The Tory Tendency

I’m halfway through Orley Farm and what is so striking is the overwhelming atmosphere of permanence to those class sensibilities. It is the only possible way.

The second thing that stands out is how imperfect those worthies are, every last one of them.

I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to be able to stand these two things together for another several hundred pages.

He writes well though.

As long as I remain Duke of Omnium…..

A word of advice regarding Orley Farm: It’s one of the novels where Trollope’s unique method led him into a trap. He imagined situations, he imagined characters to fit into them, he thought his way very deeply into the characters, and then, very scrupulously, he let the situation play out as the characters dictated — rather than manipulate the characters for dramatic effect, as Dickens would.

In Orley Farm, only one resolution was possible, and it could only be postponed up to a certain point, which was reached before the manuscript had attained the length promised the publisher. So there is a huge wad of filler between the denouement and the back cover. (Or so I recall. It’s one I have never reread, and I read it many years ago.)

It was bad to interfere with the slaveowners’ natural, gradual ending of slavery, bad to endure Reconstruction, bad to put up with Progressives and New Dealers. The post-FDR Democrat Party was bad. All interference with states’ rights has been bad. The Social Security Act was very bad. Encroachment on the right of union-free contract was bad. Taking prayer out of schools was the worst of all. Abolition of legal segregation, blue laws, and loyalty oaths were all bad.The meddling from liberal universities has been grievous. The treatment of the Bible-believing churches has been Satanic. The overhauling of schools is most injurious to American education. Education bills and income tax bills were all bad. Every step taken has been bad. And yet to them America is of all countries in the world the best place to live in, and is not at all the less comfortable because of the changes that have been made. … To have been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of statism-communism-fascism – and yet never to lose anything, not even position, or public esteem, is pleasant enough.

Trollope has a scene–I think its in the Duke’s Children–which crystalizes where I finally stand on things. I’m moved by conservative arguments sometimes and sometimes agree with conservative positions on specific issues, but my presumptions are always with liberal views. In the Duke’s Children, the heir to the dukedom of Omnium flirts for a while with Toryism, but ultimately comes back to the family’s liberalism. In the scene where this return is acknowledged, the Duke says of conservative views that there is real value in having someone to put the brakes on the carriage of state to prevent it from going too far too fast, and so there can be real value to conservative political approaches. But, says the Duke, there are always plenty of people wanting to put on the brakes, for plenty of reasons (some not so admirable, although I can’t remember if he makes that explicit). Thus, it’s more useful to be on the side, generally, of having the courage to try something new to address problems, rather than be a constant voice for being too afraid to change at all for fear that change might get away from you. I admire that.

Trollope is an interesting author, for the reasons someone mentioned above. He doesn’t take control of his own creations, but allows them to play out who they are. He’s more of a witness than an advocate. I admire that, too, but I can see how some could find it boring.

3: external triumphs, but internal defeats. The narrative is one of betrayal and being stabbed in the back. So: they defeated Communism (external) despite the best efforts of Red sympathisers in academia and the government (internal). Note that all the attitudes of Trollope’s Tory are similar: he doesn’t mention, for example, defeating Napoleon.

I have to agree with y81. Toryism as described in the quotation is a minority position among US conservatives. Most of its professed adherents are just poseurs, who for some inexplicable reason think Evelyn Waugh is a good person to pretend to be. Palin is certainly not one. The character in question (for the life of me I can’t recall who it is) would have been as horrified by Palin as anyone here, though for different reasons.

(As it happens, I recently picked up David Niven’s second memoir, Bring on the Empty Horses, at a yard sale. He finds good things to say about most of the famous people he met, but Waugh seriously pissed him off by referring to his black housekeeper as “your native bearer.”)

Just curious, roac: what did you mean in #6 about Dickens “manipulating his characters for effect”?

Where dramatic structure requires someone to have a striking change of heart, it duly happens. Though Dickens was of course a genius and always, or almost always, makes this credible.

But when he fails, he fails spectacularly. The second half of Our Mutual Friend featuring the metamorphosis of Noddy Boffin, the Golden Dustman, into a grasping miser must have seemed a good idea at the time.

I think the closest thing in Trollope to modern movement ‘conservatism’ in the sense of ‘party before principle — winning elections is the natural end of man’ must be the Conservative leader Daubeny’s embrace of disestablishment, and the immediate volte-face of the Tories — former staunch preservers of the established Church — all for tactical, electoral reasons. (Phineas Redux? It’s been a while.)

roac:
You’re right, the Duke of Omnium (I mean the one from the Barchester Chronicles) was a Whig, not a Tory. I forgot that. I fixated on his bland tolerance for any arrangement, however foolish he thought it, that would allow him to remain Duke of Omnium.

roac @ 17: Thanks for the clarification. Actually, I wasn’t challenging you about Dickens; I was wondering, more generally, how one makes literary judgments of that sort. Given that characters are being created on the page in the course of the story, and there’s no factual record against which to evaluate them, how can we tell when a change of heart is plausible and when it’s contrived? And how (even more generally) do we judge whether a character is “successful”? It’s a very common form of literary-critical judgment, but I still don’t have a very sure grasp of it.

@22: A very fair question to ask, and I don’t have an answer to it, except to say that it’s an aesthetic judgment and hence, I would have to concede, inherently subjective; the best you can hope for is a broad consensus. There is no doubt a technical literature on the subject, but I’m not an academic.

My original point was that Trollope himself worked to construct in his mind a detailed picture of his principal characters, and, having arrived at one, he felt an ethical obligation not to have the character do something inconsistent with the construct — even where that would have been convenient to advance the narrative or to produce a dramatic effect. (Both internal analysis, and Trollope’s own description of his practice, support this assertion.) Probably any good novelist working in a realist mode feels the same constraint, but Trollope put it an unusually central position.

@23: My remark was based on my rather vague memory of what I read somewhere about the founders of the Dartmouth Review. My impression is that all of those guys had just watched Brideshead Revisited and were walking around Hanover with teddy bears under their arms as a result.

I see however that the D. Review was founded in 1980 and B. Revisited first aired in 1981 (in the US too?). Nonetheless.

The Eustace Diamonds? Good luck, and brace yourself for the Jews therein.

DXM, maybe roac meant to criticize Boffin’s (Harmon’s?) rather harsh strategy for teaching Bella a lesson as inconsistent with his thitherto gentle nature. In general, I think one could make a case for the absence in Trollope of Sissy Jupes, Oliver Twists, and other characters who behave in a manner that their backgrounds suggest is impossible.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that Trollope’s aristocrats, having survived unscathed through two and a half centuries of “bad” things, were in fact on their last legs.

Not in fact true. Individual aristocrats might have come in for harsh times in the late 19th and 20th centuries, but as a class they’re still doing rather better than others. Land still is a source of wealth.

In fact true. The value of agricultural land in the UK tanked in the 1870s and didn’t really recover until the post-WW2 swing to productivism and eventually implementation of the CAP. The importance of the Landed Interest as a political force went the same way; there was a reason why the Conservative Party had to do an agonising reappraisal in the 1890s and why the result, which focused on the lower middle class (and after 1918, on women) was called “Villa Toryism” not, say, “Grand Estate Toryism”.

The Duke of Westminster, of course, was OK because *his* land holdings are also known as the West End of London.

‘Not in fact true. Individual aristocrats might have come in for harsh times in the late 19th and 20th centuries, but as a class they’re still doing rather better than others. Land still is a source of wealth.’

Indeed, if opinion polls are to be believed, an Etonian educated aristocrat is about to be elected Prime Minister of the UK.

Indeed, if opinion polls are to be believed, an Etonian educated aristocrat is about to be elected Prime Minister of the UK.

He comes from a long line of stockbrokers, which is stretching any definition of ‘aristocrat’ that Trollope would have been familiar with. Rich merchants still smell of the shop, dontcha know?

The traditional aristocracy was decimated by the great depression, and to an almost equal extent by the economic impact of the Great War, and the fact that quite a few of the very richest rode it out doesn’t affect the point.

y81: “Which classes, even now, are having their position undermined by changes in the relations of production of which they are hardly aware? Which of them will be mere parody identities in fifty years? Investment bankers? University professors? Physicians? Time will tell.”

Interesting that you say this. My impression of the Tea Baggers is that they are people who thought that they were middle class, but by now are working class, the post-WWII economic order having been trashed.

I don’t go west of the Hudson much, but my impression of the tea partiers is that they are from the class that Gallup or Pew or someone labeled “Enterprisers”: they mostly work as small businessmen or salesmen or something entrepreneurial; they are conservative in their personal lives but not much into culture wars; they are very hostile to taxes and regulation, and this attribute, combined with their relative indifference to culture wars issues, would lead some to call them “libertarian”; to the extent they have a view of history–and many of them are voracious consumers of middlebrow historical literature like Bruce Catton or various recent books on the Founding Fathers–their views are as I have described; and their incomes are down from two or three years ago. I don’t know why anyone would accuse them of being on welfare or not working, unless there is some arcane reference intended to the mortgage tax deduction as welfare or something similarly tendentious. They have, for sure, almost nothing in common with Trollope’s tories.

38: I don’t know why anyone would accuse them of being on welfare or not working

Well, for one thing, I suspect quite a few of them are retired, and therefore benefitting from the socialised medicine they decry so fiercely. 40% of self-identified tea party members are over 50. And wouldn’t you expect that quite a few of them are unemployed? Certainly seem to have time on their hands.

Ahh! the pleasures of a Trollope thread!

Orley Farm is wonderful in the awareness it has about the limitations of women’s lives. Trollope generates great sympathy for poor Lady Mason, which makes it more frustrating that Lizzie Eustace, who could have been a great villain or alternately a Scarlett O’hara type, is ultimately such a ditz. The plotting of the Eustace Diamonds is also highly modern with it’s mystery fakeout–Trollope reveals who did it and why right in the middle–essentially saying that one doesn’t read Trollope novels for the plot but rather the characters and their interactions. Where you see Trollope really doing something different is in Phineas Redux; he takes minor characters that he has excoriated all along (lawyers) and finds them worthwhile and necessary. He changes his mind, which seems extraordinary for most human beings, much less famous novelists. Phineas Redux is also the novel that most closely criticizes the status quo, as poor put-upon Phineas gets tried for murder. IIRC, the only “change” that Plantagenet Palliser could get behind was his decimal coinage plan–not exactly the stuff of Liberal dreams.

@35: According to Wikipedia, there are seven generations between William IV and David Cameron. For quite a liberal value of “practically everyone,” let’s say 30,000,000, just about half the UK population. For King William to have that many living descendants today would require every member of his line to have on average 10 or 11 children–assuming no marriages at all between cousins of any distance.

@44: and let’s not forget it was on the wrong side of the blanket, though emphasising the taint of bastardy may have lost its sting with time…

45: well, tenured academics, by definition, all have jobs, but people over 50 don’t necessarily. I’m not quite sure what point you’re making here.

Still going? In that case, thanks for no. 53; I’ll look for your book!

I was fascinated to discover from IMdB that in the BBC series, Silverbridge and Tregear were played by none other than Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons — seven years before Brideshead Revisited aired.

(Another sidebar for Ellen Moody: I picked up an old paperback mystery by Julian Symons at a thrift shop a few months ago, and was startled to find that the situation and narrative structure of the opening chapters were directly lifted from The Prime Minister. No question about it being deliberate as Symons wrote introductions to several Trollope novels. The plot goes off in a completely different direction, of course. The title is The Detling Secret (The Detling Murders in England, I see). Quite a good book. It’s set a few decades later than Trollope’s period, at the end of Gladstone’s last administration.)