Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
write nothing. A plan was formed for extending the rural delivery
of letters, and for adjusting the work, which up to that time had
been done in a very irregular manner. A country letter-carrier
would be sent in one direction in which there were but few letters
to be delivered, the arrangement having originated probably at
the request of some influential person, while in another direction
there was no letter-carrier because no influential person had exerted
himself. It was intended to set this right throughout England,
Ireland, and Scotland; and I quickly did the work in the Irish
district to which I was attached. I was then invited to do the same
in a portion of England, and I spent two of the happiest years of
my life at the task. I began in Devonshire; and visited, I think
I may say, every nook in that county, in Cornwall, Somersetshire,
the greater part of Dorsetshire, the Channel Islands, part of
Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire,
Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I
had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain,
with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business
after a fashion in which no other official man has worked at
least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had
two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired
a third horse. I had an Irish groom with me,--an old man, who has
now been in my service for thirty-five years; and in this manner I
saw almost every house--I think I may say every house of importance--in
this large district. The object was to create a postal network
which should catch all recipients of letters. In France it was, and
I suppose still is, the practice to deliver every letter. Wherever
the man may live to whom a letter is addressed, it is the duty of
some letter-carrier to take that letter to his house, sooner or
later. But this, of course, must be done slowly. With us a delivery
much delayed was thought to be worse than none at all. In some places
we did establish posts three times a week, and perhaps occasionally
twice a week; but such halting arrangements were considered to
be objectionable, and we were bound down by a salutary law as to
expense, which came from our masters at the Treasury. We were not
allowed to establish any messenger's walk on which a sufficient
number of letters would not be delivered to pay the man's wages,
counted at a halfpenny a letter. But then the counting was in our
own hands, and an enterprising official might be sanguine in his
figures. I think I was sanguine. I did not prepare false accounts;
but I fear that the postmasters and clerks who absolutely had the
country to do became aware that I was anxious for good results.
It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During
those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country
with rural letter-carriers. I do not remember that in any case a
rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities; but I
fear that some of them broke down afterwards as being too poor, or
because, in my anxiety to include this house and that, I had sent
the men too far afield. Our law was that a man should not be required
to walk more than sixteen miles a day. Had the work to be done been
all on a measured road, there would have been no need for doubt as
to the distances. But my letter-carriers went here and there across
the fields. It was my special delight to take them by all short
cuts; and as I measured on horseback the short cuts which they would
have to make on foot, perhaps I was sometimes a little unjust to
them.
All this I did on horseback, riding on an average forty miles a
day. I was paid sixpence a mile for the distance travelled, and it
was necessary that I should at any rate travel enough to pay for
my equipage. This I did, and got my hunting out of it also. I have
often surprised some small country postmaster, who had never seen
or heard of me before, by coming down upon him at nine in the
morning, with a red coat and boots and breeches, and interrogating
him as to the disposal of every letter which came into his office.
And in the same guise I would ride up to farmhouses, or parsonages,
or other lone residences about the country, and ask the people how
they got their letters, at what hour, and especially whether they
were delivered free or at a certain charge. For a habit had crept
into use, which came to be, in my eyes, at that time, the one sin
for which there was no pardon, in accordance with which these rural
letter-carriers used to charge a penny a letter, alleging that the
house was out of their beat, and that they must be paid for their
extra work. I think that I did stamp out that evil. In all these
visits I was, in truth, a beneficent angel to the public, bringing
everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery
of letters. But not unfrequently the angelic nature of my mission
was imperfectly understood. I was perhaps a little in a hurry to
get on, and did not allow as much time as was necessary to explain
to the wondering mistress of the house, or to an open-mouthed farmer,
why it was that a man arrayed for hunting asked so many questions
which might be considered impertinent, as applying to his or her
private affairs. "Good-morning, sir. I have just called to ask a
few questions. I am a surveyor of the Post Office. How do you get
your letters? As I am a little in a hurry, perhaps you can explain
at once." Then I would take out my pencil and notebook, and wait
for information. And in fact there was no other way in which the
truth could be ascertained. Unless I came down suddenly as a summer's
storm upon them, the very people who were robbed by our messengers
would not confess the robbery, fearing the ill-will of the men. It
was necessary to startle them into the revelations which I required
them to make for their own good. And I did startle them. I became
thoroughly used to it, and soon lost my native bashfulness;--but
sometimes my visits astonished the retiring inhabitants of country
houses. I did, however, do my work, and can look back upon what I
did with thorough satisfaction. I was altogether in earnest; and
I believe that many a farmer now has his letters brought daily to
his house free of charge, who but for me would still have had to
send to the post-town for them twice a week, or to have paid a man
for bringing them irregularly to his door.
This work took up my time so completely, and entailed upon me so
great an amount of writing, that I was in fact unable to do any
literary work. From day to day I thought of it, still purporting
to make another effort, and often turning over in my head some
fragment of a plot which had occurred to me. But the day did not
come in which I could sit down with my pen and paper and begin
another novel. For, after all, what could it be but a novel? The
play had failed more absolutely than the novels, for the novels
had attained the honour of print. The cause of this pressure of
official work lay, not in the demands of the General Post Office,
which more than once expressed itself as astonished by my celerity,
but in the necessity which was incumbent on me to travel miles
enough to pay for my horses, and upon the amount of correspondence,
returns, figures, and reports which such an amount of daily travelling
brought with it. I may boast that the work was done very quickly
and very thoroughly,--with no fault but an over-eagerness to extend
postal arrangements far and wide.
In the course of the job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering
there one mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I
conceived the story of The Warden,--from whence came that series of
novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon,
was the central site. I may as well declare at once that no one
at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to
presume himself to be able to write about clergymen. I have been
often asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long
in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a
Close. I never lived in any cathedral city,--except London, never
knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar
intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon, who has been said to be
life-like, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent's fond
affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral
consciousness. It was such as that, in my opinion, that an archdeacon
should be,--or, at any rate, would be with such advantages as
an archdeacon might have; and lo! an archdeacon was produced, who
has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon
down to the very ground. And yet, as far as I can remember, I had
not then even spoken to an archdeacon. I have felt the compliment
to be very great. The archdeacon came whole from my brain after
this fashion;--but in writing about clergymen generally, I had to
pick up as I went whatever I might know or pretend to know about
them. But my first idea had no reference to clergymen in general.
I had been struck by two opposite evils,--or what seemed to me to
be evils,--and with an absence of all art-judgment in such matters, I
thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe
them, both in one and the same tale. The first evil was the
possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had
been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed
to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more
than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which
there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable
purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been
much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often
been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards
the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered
to be the chief sinners in the matter. When a man is appointed to
a place, it is natural that he should accept the income allotted
to that place without much inquiry. It is seldom that he will be
the first to find out that his services are overpaid. Though he be
called upon only to look beautiful and to be dignified upon State
