A Boring Christmas from Trollope

The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

published 1864

 

 

[excerpt] It was very long and very dull that Christmas evening, making Bernard feel strongly that he would be very foolish to give up his profession, and tie himself down to a life at Allington.

Women are more accustomed than men to long, dull, unemployed hours; and, therefore, Mrs Dale and her daughters bore the tedium courageously. While he yawned, stretched himself, and went in and out of the room, they sat demurely, listening as the squire laid down the law on small matters, and contradicting him occasionally when the spirit of either of them prompted her specially to do so.

“Of course you know much better than I do,” he would say.

“Not at all,” Mrs Dale would answer. “I don’t pretend to know anything about it. But—”

So the evening wore itself away; and when the squire was left alone at half-past nine, he did not feel that the day had passed badly with him. That was his style of life, and he expected no more from it than he got. He did not look to find things very pleasant.

 

comment: I like the idea of a Christmas entry which is a less than perfect Christmas – though it’s a bit unfair on Trollope and this book. Normally with him, cheerfulness keeps breaking in, even when he has cleverly shown something that’s suboptimal. See here for earlier post on this book, with more details of the setup.

And this is a really great book – I haven’t yet found a Trollope book I don’t like.

The author has a very good line in seriously scarey women - see particularly Mrs Hurtle in this entry on The Way We Live Now. Here we have this:

Eames was no coward. He feared no man on earth. But he was terribly afraid of Amelia Roper.

and we know Eames is no coward because of the very unlikely scene where he gets into a fight at a railway station, by the WHSmiths of all places:

‘the combatants [fell] back into Mr Smith’s bookstall, and there Eames laid his foe prostrate among the newspapers, falling himself into the yellow shilling-novel depot by the over fury of his own energy.’

And Trollope can tell a story in a few lines. I loved this sad tale of the doctor and the big house, always a fraught class relationship in novels of the era:

Dr Gruffen had once been asked to dinner at Guestwick Manor. “Just a bachelor’s chop,” said the earl; “for there’s nobody at home but myself.” Gruffen had come in coloured trousers,—and had never again been asked to dine at Guestwick Manor.

That’s it, that’s the whole anecdote. I like to compare that with Dickens’s style - I revere Dickens too, but his version would have been three pages long (‘Dr G looked at his blue trousers and looked at his checked trousers and thought about the dinner’) full of supplementary side wanderings, perhaps the doctor thinking he’d been a success and slowly realizing he had done something wrong. Trollope’s two-line story is so clever.

Last year I did a post on FM Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter, and identified a genre I called spinster miserylit. The daughter of the title is Mary, and to me one of the most touching moments in that rather sad book was that she reads Trollope and ‘tries not to wish her father’ were more like him. And who can blame her? Anthony Trollope, from his books, comes over as someone who sees the worst of human nature but is still endlessly kind, patient and good-hearted. (Sometime I must read a biography and see if he was really like that, and whether he was the ideal father. There is a regular blog commenter who may even have a recommendation for me…)

By happy chance I came across the top picture, which could easily be a boring Christmas I feel. In fact it is in a collection illustrating mourning practices: it has this title:

A quiet dinner with Dr. Bottles; after which he reads aloud Miss Babbles latest work

There’s a surprisingly modern and disrespectful feel about the pictures, by Charles Dana Gibson, which show the widow rather longing to get back to a normal life.  It’s from the NY Metropolitan Museum fashion collection. It is from 1900, much later than the book, but it was so apt I had to use it. Gibson was a very well-known illustrator in his day, famed for creating the iconic Gibson Girl.

Christmas scene from the Brooklyn Museum.