Anthony Trollope

And to Disraeli, Whiggism, as it was kind of, you know, kind of re-energised by Burke as he saw it.

was this kind of nefarious mixture of kind of landlordism, like the idea of like they're the, in Trollope, they're the Dukes of Omnium.

So they're the big land owners who are very distant from tenants and things like that.

War with France, so a kind of specific kind of like foreign policy.

I think that even in the 19th century, these clearly were intellectual outputs for Disraeli.

There were also ways, there were also kind of vehicles of making money, for making money.

And I think that, you know, even... you know, Sybil and the Young England trilogy of Coningsby and Tancred as well of the 1840s that does later get canonised as these really significant condition of England novels at the time were like kind of were kind of like laughed off as like, you know, insincere kind of contributions and, you know, And novelists like Trollope and figures who have already mentioned, you know, even later when Disraeli was pretty well known, you know, a kind of political celebrity, dismissed the novels as kind of like, you know, I think Lothair was described as by Trollope as having the flavour of hair oil.

So, like, with a reference to the coils.

Moss of Water Street? Nor does this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions.

It applies to Anthony Trollope, and as much as anyone, to George Eliot.

For we have not only survived that present which Thackeray described, we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward.

It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness, and the balance of the constitution.

And it must be remembered that nearly everybody else did yield to it, especially those writers who are commonly counted Dickens' superiors in art and exactitude and closeness to connected reality.

Thackeray wallowed in it.

Anthony Trollope lived on it.

Those modern artists who prided themselves most on the separation and unity of a work of art have indulged in it often.

And every now and again I go back to the 19th century because in a way the great novels stem from there, so many of them.

Trollope I like a lot.

And I read the Cazalet novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard recently.

Having been told by my wife for years that I wouldn't like them, I found them fascinating, partly because I come from the village she was writing about, and I know their house.

... which was partly connected to the Industrial Revolution, which stretched from about 1780 to about 1950.

It seems to me that, uh, many of your role models are like, uh, Squire Thorn of Ullathorne in, um, Trollope's Barchester Chronicles, or, uh, Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen's Emma, uh, or Christopher Tietjens, um, in Ford Madox Ford's, uh, tetralogy about the, uh, the First World War.

Or, or, or, or Boot in Scoop.

Yes.

And it would be, you know, sort of looked at as what they called a fixed eye.

And it became kind of a metaphor for some writers like Anthony Trollope and others for a character who is suspicious, perhaps evil, something bad going on.

You know, you give them a fixed eye.

and it kind of freaks people out and they don't know where they're looking.

Well, I'd studied literature at university, and this was like reading a Victorian novel.

You know, I wasn't saying it was at the standard of Trollope or Thackeray, but it was very, very good.

And it was being told in the 1850s, but the author had the capacity to render, you know.

But you knew, to go

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information, or to volunteer, contact LibriVox.org. Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope Chapter 60 Madame Goesler's Politics It may be remembered that when Lady Glencora Palliser was shown into Madame Goesler's room, Madame Goesler had just explained somewhat forcibly to the Duke of Omnium her reasons for refusing the loan of His Grace's villa at Como.

She had told the Duke in so many words that she did not mean to give the world an opportunity of maligning her, and it would then have been left to the Duke to decide whether any other arrangements might have been made for taking Madame Goesler to Como, had he not been interrupted.

That he was very anxious to take her was certain.