Trollope On the Net - Hardcover

Moody, Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1852851902 ISBN 13: 9781852851903

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003

Synopsis

This book takes up two topics. The first is the British novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), author of 47 novels and five volumes of short stories. The second is the Internet, specifically the creation of virtual communities through email and discussion lists, focusing, naturally enough, on discussion of the works of Trollope.

The first chapter tells how the group began and focuses on the conversation that ensued on Trollopes first novel: The Macdermots of Ballycloran. The second chapter widens the discussion to take in all of Trollope's Irish novels. The third records the conversation of the group on Trollope's novel of jealousy: He Knew He Was Right. The fourth chapter discusses Trollope's shorter novels. The fifth returns to the group conversations; this time the discussion of The Claverings. The sixth chapter discusses the illustrations of Trollope's novels. The seventh chapter records the group conversation on Trollope's most class-ridden novel, Lady Anna. The eighth chapter discusses trollope's life, through his An Autobiography. The last chapter sets the group conversation on Can You Forgive Her? into the context of the Palliser (or Parliamentary) novel sequence.

The Preface is by John Letts, Chairman of the (British) Trollope Society. The book contains twenty-four illustrations from the original editions of Trollope's novels.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Moody lives in Alexandria, near Washington DC. She has taught at various colleges in and around New York City and Washington DC and is now at George Mason University. Her academic publications range from Elizabethan sonnet sequences to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. She has been active on the Net since 1994.

From the Inside Flap

Anthony Trollope, whose range was greater than any other Victorian novelist and whose depth was equal to the greatest of them, retains the power to surprise us. His work, with its subtle analysis of human motives and feelings, keeps its relevance today. On the eve of the Millennium he is. in many ways, the most modern of the Victorians. It is therefore apt that he should lead the great Victorian writers into cyberspace. Trollope on the Net is an account, by its leader, Ellen Moody, of a group discussion of Trollope's works on Trollope-l, the world-wide Internet discussion group devoted to his study.

Many of Trollope's books, from massive three-deckers to his novellas and short stories, certainly deserve to be better known. Members of the group read an agreed programme of works. Most were lesser known ones, including the Irish books, The Claverings, Lady Anna and The Golden Lion of Granpere, but the group also discussed An Autobiography, He Knew He Was Right, Can You Forgive Her?, The Way We Live Now, Orley Farm and the Barsetshire novels, commenting on their form, content, structure, detail and meaning. The Internet discussion was both serious and informal, mostly harmonious, but with occasional tensions. It allowed a close focus on the works. These discussions are reported and the nature of the works summarized by Ellen Moody, whose scholarship and incisive analysis pervades the book. She argues that the Irish books, beginning with The Macdermots of Ballycloran, should be seen as a set to rival Barchester and the Pallisers, and discusses the part played by the original illustrations to Trollope's work as a whole.

It can be argued that Trollope's works until a few years ago commanded greater respect from readers than from academics. This pioneering work takes a giant step in redressing the balance. It will certainly send readers out for copies of the books they haven't read; it should encourage many more in the future to join in the discussion on Trollope-l of an author who continues to engage new readers 120 years after his death.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

During the group discussion and selection process which had resulted in our reading The Claverings and Lady Anna in tandem, I quoted one of several contemporary reviewers of Lady Anna who had been appalled by the novel, and who had angrily condemned Trollope for writing an 'embittered' book which contains shocking 'disruptions of the social order' through which Trollope 'betrayed' his class. Trollope's declaration that Lady Anna was the 'the best novel I ever wrote! Very much! Quite far away above all others!!!' was his response to letters from friends who resented, and protested against, the marriage of an earl's daughter to a working-class man and 'all the horrors of the novel'. A modern Victorian scholar, David Skilton, thinks that a radical tailor like Daniel Thwaite was 'anathema' to most of Trollope's readers; Trollope had worked 'his purpose of this marriage from beginning to end', with both Daniel and his father displaying such an 'impudent presumption and lack of respect for rank throughout' that Trollope shocked his readers. Skilton suggests that the attack upon Trollope's book shows the convention of the happy marriage between social equals in novels had the social function of validating a status quo. A modern social critic, Paul Johnson, says the rumour that Trollope had written the novel to win an absurd bet reveals that many readers refused to take the novel seriously. The rumour was a way of categorising and getting people to dismiss the novel as silly outrageous nonsense. One reviewer went so far as to reveal the book's ending to stop people from buying it. The threat that the novel had seemed to pose to upper class standards of self-worth and justifications of privilege in 1874 was still felt in 1996. Early on one of our members, who had a gift for ironic mockery, allowed everyone the release of laughter by imagining the following scene between him, me and one of our more frequent contributors: DC is sitting in a cafe chatting to an attractive young woman when RJK and Ellen come up and tell him that his innamorata has been seen in the company of a self-confessed tailor. There is a sudden silence, DC's face turns white with shock and shame, and he totters to his feet. 'Thanks old chap' he mutters brokenly and goes into the library. A shot is heard.

Regards, DC The difference between what was publicly written in 1874 and in 1996 was that 122 years later people who identified with the novel's journeyman-tailor, Daniel Thwaite, and its possibly base-born heroine, Lady Anna, also spoke. About half-way through the book Tony Prince wrote that he was now 'firmly on the side of Daniel Thwaite': 'The strength of his honest dedication and the love for Anna he expressed in the scene with the lawyer was winning, especially when juxtaposed with the young earl's fickle musings'. The young Earl cares more about how he looks to others than any feelings he might have. He is 'a suitor with his finger in the air gauging which direction the winds of his family's and society's breezes are blowing': I also discovered a wonderful line in this week's instalment that I plan to use the very next time I take a sick day from work. When I am asked why I am not coming in to work, I shall hold my head high and say that my doctor has informed me that I am 'harrassed in spirit . . . and must be taken away, so that [I] might be amused'. The derogatory way the upper-class characters and Trollope's narrator refer to both Thwaites made a number of us uncomfortable. When people expressed 'dismay' at the way Trollope's characters could call the marriage of Lady Anna to Daniel Thwaite a 'pollution', Sigmund Eisner wrote in to remind us that for its time Lady Anna was radical: The choice between the rough, black-bearded, honest, egalitarian Daniel, and the smooth, clean-shaven, honest, aristocratic Fredrick does not mean exactly the same thing to us today as it did to Trollope's nineteenth-century English readers. Many of us in the late twentieth century see virtue in the common man because he is a common man, and at the same time we look upon the non-working aristocrat as a social parasite. The world has changed. To most of the nineteenth century an aristocrat, if he lived up to his class's ideals, was a better person than the navvy, even though he was the best navvy around. Trollope is suggesting something fairly radical for his time: the genuine virtue of a virtuous man, be he the scion of a long line of tailors or earls. Therein, I think, lies the interest of the book. Through using the mandarin academic style of modern criticism, scholars can talk impersonally about the corrosive effects on self-esteem and confidence inflicted by the hidden injuries of class and the way exclusionary practices can make the excluded hate themselves and others. Scholars often defuse the literal content of a text by finding irony (where there may be none). They speak of a 'text' which is detached from the author and themselves. When confronted with Lady Anna's mother's hatred of her daughter when she finds Anna determined to marry someone of lower rank, they need not respond directly or morally to the situation. They can, for example, calmly talk of how we can 'find in the text' the self-destructive results of hate and feelings of inadequacy in Lady Anna's mother without offending a reader or giving their own position or feeling about the matter away (Lady Anna, pp. 30-31, 222-25, 361-67, 388-91).3 The common reader does not deflect the real reading experience of books through such sophisticated ploys, and many of the participants in our group pretended to no such distanced objectivity. The result was our conversation about Lady Anna on the Net had the merit of candid honesty; it was also more than occasionally unpleasant.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852851902
• ISBN 13: 9781852851903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 285