Trollope & Orley Farm: wills, court cases and 1066 & All that

Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope

published 1861-1862

 

 

Last year in the Clothes in Books Christmas scenes series, I looked at The Small House at Allington, a later book by Trollope, which had a tremendous description of a very boring Christmas.  Around that time (but not in the comments to that post) someone told me to read Orley Farm for its Christmas-y content – alas, I do not remember who, please speak up and claim credit.

So obv I read it, and it is full of seasonal chapeters, and there will be a Christmas entry at the right time.

This post is more general, and sadly, Orley Farm did not become a new Trollope favourite: I’ve never read a really bad one, but this tale dragged a bit, and was unusually miserable. It started well with the author warning us not to be worried by the title

This book of mine will not be devoted in any special way to rural delights. The name might lead to the idea that new precepts were to be given…as to cream-cheeses, pigs with small bones, wheat sown in drills, or artificial manure. No such aspirations are mine. I make no attempts in that line.

Promising for me – I am not a fan of rural detail. I should be the ideal reader. Though there is quite a lot about guano, along with this splendid sentence about one of the key young men:

In the search after unadulterated guano…Who could tell whether he might not insist on chartering a vessel, himself, for the Peruvian coast?

There’s quite the section of the book dealing with commercial travellers, which is actually interesting in a very weird way. They gather together in their regular inns together as they travel around, and there are some great scenes – a discussion of whether smoking is allowed in the communal rooms and a wonderful long falling-out about splitting the bill. Does everyone pay the same, or does the man who didn’t drink the shared wine pay less? It is wonderful, SO modern-seeming, you might as well be on the Dear Prudence advice (ie complaint) column online in 2010. And then there is a man demonstrating his awful shoddy metal furniture, claiming it is solid when it plainly isn’t:

Then lightly poising himself on his toe, he stepped on to the chair, and from thence on to the table. In that position he skillfully brought his feet together, so that his weight was directly on the leg, and gracefully waved his hands over his head.

There is a young woman called Creusa, a name worthy of Patricia Wentworth.

The main plot concerns a legal problem: a man who was married twice, a will, a codicil, a legal fight over the Farm of the title. This all happened 20 years before the book starts – but the whole case is about to be disinterred, and a fierce fight will result. Trollope is very good at doing dilemmas, and you very much wonder in this one how he is going to sort it out. There’s an element of that much-loved and very useful feature of 1066 and All That – some are Wrong but Wromantic, others are Right but Repulsive. I thought Trollope did a very good job of resolving it in the end. (Sellars and Yeatman's masterpiece  has been mentioned a few times on the blog, obv normally when we venture into history...)

Lady Mason, the main female character, is fascinating:

She was plainly dressed, without any full exuberance of costume, and yet everything about her was neat and pretty, and everything had been the object of feminine care. A very plain dress may occasion as much study as the most elaborate,—and may be quite as worthy of the study it has caused. Lady Mason, I am inclined to think, was by no means indifferent to the subject, but then to her belonged the great art of hiding her artifice.

(is this a version of the trope of men-who-think-women-are simply-dressed when they are not? Great favourite on the blog eg here)

There is another plot, concerning a young man who is paying for a young woman, Mary,  to be educated to be his wife – ‘moulded’. Trollope is clear what he thinks:

On the whole I think that the ordinary plan is the better, and even the safer. Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music—about affairs masculine and feminine,—then take the leap in the dark. There is danger, no doubt; but the moulded wife is, I think, more dangerous.

Not to mention, intensely creepy to modern eyes. The plan is doomed to failure, luckily, because Mary has quite a dull life and has met someone else. Her respectable chaperone, Mrs Thomas, discovers something is wrong, and Mary has an interesting take on this:

In these days Mary's anger against Mrs. Thomas was very strong. That Mrs. Thomas should have used all her vigilance to detect such goings on was only natural. What woman in Mrs. Thomas's position,—or in any other position,—would not have done so? Mary Snow knew that had she herself been the duenna she would have left no corner of a box unturned but she would have found those letters. And having found themshe would have used her power over the poor girl. She knew that. But she would not have betrayed her to the man. Truth between woman and woman should have prevented that.

Solidarity is always important.

One of the locations of the book is Groby – a name that also features in the Parade’s End books by blog favourite Ford Madox Ford.

And I was delighted to see this

Cowcross Street, Smithfield, was the site of [his] residence, the destruction of rats in a barrel was his profession, and his name was Carroty Bob.

This is a place I know well (and not far at all from where they shoot the Slow Horses TV series), and Cowcross St has a reputation since at least Shakespeare’s time of being full of taverns and low places, and is like that now.

This is not top-level Trollope in my personal list, I thought it was long and grim and had a rushed ending. But there was still much to enjoy.

Illo of men’s fashions from Wikimedia Commons.

Two women Wikimedia Commons