Vol. 11 No. 3 · 2 February 1989
pages 19-22 | 4376 words
Unhappy Childhoods
John Sutherland
- Trollope and Character by Stephen Wall
Faber, 397 pp, £17.50, September 1988, ISBN 0 571 14595 7
- The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope by R.H. Super
University of Michigan Press, 528 pp, $35.00, December 1988, ISBN 0 472 10102 1
- Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan
Hodder, 607 pp, £17.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 340 48558 2
- Charlotte Brontë by Rebecca Fraser
Methuen, 543 pp, £14.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 413 57010 X
Stephen Wall sees as crucial those passages in An Autobiography where Trollope rhapsodises on his equality with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned.’ These Trollopian people did not dissolve with the end of their novels and novel sequences. After the narrative had done with them, they were like friends who go to live in another town: no less solid because out of view. A character like Plantagenet Palliser ducks in and out of novels for the best part of two decades, evolving between his appearances from odious young prig to noble old man. Like wine in the cellar, he was maturing, even when we couldn’t see him. The author, Trollope claimed in another rhapsody, must be prepared to argue with his characters, ‘quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them’. Trollope, not to put too fine a point on it, verges on the crazy in his insistence that his characters ‘live’. One would like to think it a foible – Pirandelloish game-playing. But he goes on about it at such length that we have in the end to believe that Plantagenet Palliser, Glencora, Lizzie Eustace, Madame Max, Phineas Finn and all the rest of the gallery were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 5 · 2 March 1989
From Philip Collins
John Sutherland’s review (LRB, 2 February) of recent biographies of Trollope, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë – biographies which argue that both Trollope and Brontë considerably misrepresented the facts of their early years – is well justified in further remarking that Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, published in Forster’s Life (1872), is our only authority for the Warren’s Blacking and other juvenile episodes, and that we should wonder whether, like so many other autobiographical documents, it contains distortions, fabrications or substantially inaccurate memories. Moreover, as I showed in an essay contributed to Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (October 1984), Forster did some rum things with Dickens’s manuscript, which then, alas, he failed to preserve, so the published record is impaired. But Sutherland’s scepticism extends too far when he writes: ‘There is, I believe, no proof other than Dickens’s assertion that he spent any time [in the blacking warehouse] at all.’ Not so. Forster records – and there is no reason to disbelieve him – that in March or April 1847 he asked Dickens whether he ‘remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the elder Mr Dilke’. Charles Wentworth Dilke, later a prominent journalist, had in the 1820s worked as a clerk alongside Dickens’s father in the Navy Pay Office, and was walking with him one day when, as he told Forster, they observed young Charles engaged in ‘some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand’. Dilke remembered giving the boy half-a-crown and getting a very low bow in return. This anecdote disconcerted Dickens at the time, but led to his telling Forster, ‘very shortly afterwards’, details of this humiliating childhood experience. Around this time, he described it in his fragmentary autobiography.
Philip Collins
University of Leicester
From Ann Monsarrat
John Sutherland’s entertaining prowl around the childhood traumas of Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens illuminates an interesting question: if a person believes he was illtreated, are his wounds to be discounted because others sailed through the same experiences without a blemish? Charlotte Brontë’s devastating depiction of her old school has long been in dispute; it has been murmured that Dickens was being perhaps a touch too theatrical when recounting his sufferings at the famous blacking factory; and now a new biography provides evidence to show that worthy old Trollope could not have been as friendless and miserable in his youth as he claimed to have been in his hand-on-heart, ‘nothing that I say shall be untrue’ autobiography. It was, of course, unwise of Trollope to make that declaration. Truth, like beauty, all too often resides in the eye of the beholder. But was Trollope, as Sutherland suggests, wilfully telling ‘white lies’?
My husband was also wretched at school, loathing the heartiness, the crush of bodies, the senseless regulations and the casual brutality. When he wrote about it in his autobiography, his postbag became a daily wonder. A retired judge wrote that he still woke from nightmares, petrified that he was back at Winchester. Others said: ‘Disgusting nonsense. I was in the same house as you were and it wasn’t like that at all.’ (It usually turned out that they were not in the same house, but that is immaterial.) Some of his contemporaries have since told me, pityingly, that of course Nicholas got it all wrong. Winchester, at that time, was a splendid place. The beatings were pretty regular and one learned to run fast when one saw a prefect, but there was nothing extraordinary about that.
And, perhaps, therein lies at least a part of the truth. If you were not expecting anything better, then those childhood trials were tolerable. If you were sensitive, with a need for privacy and some conception of how a civilised community might behave, they were hellish. For a biographer, finding any new material on an old subject is a triumph. But it would be sad if genuine sufferings were to be discounted because – on the evidence – there appeared to be insufficient cause for such pain. If wounds expand and fester more with age, surely that is an indication of their importance.
Ann Monsarrat
Gozo, Malta
