Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because
of the expense, or because my chance of New College was supposed
to have passed away, I do not know. As a fact, I should, I believe,
have gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional
number of vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there
would have been no funds for my maintenance at the University
till I should have entered in upon the fruition of the founder's
endowment, and my career at Oxford must have been unfortunate.
When I left Winchester, I had three more years of school before me,
having as yet endured nine. My father at this time having left my
mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself
to live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm
he had hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three
miles from Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from
this house I was again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let
those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual
appurtenances of a boy at such a school, consider what must have
been my condition among them, with a daily walk of twelve miles
through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labours
of a school life!
Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition,
walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst
period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age
at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion
from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was
despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more
than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always
to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it
crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from
barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dungheaps, one could hardly
tell where one began and the other ended! There was a parlour in
which my father lived, shut up among big books; but I passed my most
jocund hours in the kitchen, making innocent love to the bailiff's
daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening,
when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the
cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk
at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a
century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was
measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never
premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from
a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still,
next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a
year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look
back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those
of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor
did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense,
except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject,
was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My
tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact
in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the
charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little
as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of
three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time
I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes
of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion,
and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent
had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed,
I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive
who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of
my school-days, I am not making a false boast.
I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that
farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative,
though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford.
My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except
what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always
in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of
self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I
think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered
fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large
rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal
incentives were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to
get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hayfields
on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much
profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years
of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering
agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when
suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an Encyclopedia
Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to the moment
of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical
terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks
and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions.
Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference,
with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful
task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out
of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear,
unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile
literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts.
And my father, though he would try, as it were by a side wind, to
get a useful spurt of work out of me, either in the garden or in
the hay-field, had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement.
From my very babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to
take my place alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the
morning, and say my early rules from the Latin Grammar, or repeat
the Greek alphabet; and was obliged at these early lessons to hold
my head inclined towards him, so that in the event of guilty fault,
he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor or
dropping his shaving-brush. No father was ever more anxious for
the education of his children, though I think none ever knew less
how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as I can remember,
he never recognised the need. He allowed himself no distraction,
and did not seem to think it was necessary to a child. I cannot
bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for
my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make
any sacrifice. At this time, in the farmhouse at Harrow Weald,
he could not give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was
not in the fields was devoted to his monks and nuns; but he would
require me to sit at a table with Lexicon and Gradus before me.
As I look back on my resolute idleness and fixed determination to
make no use whatever of the books thus thrust upon me, or of the
hours, and as I bear in mind the consciousness of great energy in
after-life, I am in doubt whether my nature is wholly altered, or
whether his plan was wholly bad. In those days he never punished
me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness; but in passion
he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great
folio Bible which he always used. In the old house were the two first
volumes of Cooper's novel, called The Prairie, a relic--probably a
dishonest relic--of some subscription to Hookham's library. Other
books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many dozen times I
read those two first volumes.
It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards
which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet, as a
walk along an English lane, when the air is sweet and the weather
fine, and when there is a charm in walking? But here were the same
lanes four times a day, in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with
all the accompanying mud and dust, and with disordered clothes. I
might have been known among all the boys at a hundred yards' distance
by my boots and trousers,--and was conscious at all times that I
was so known. I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler
when I was a little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have
said the same thing any day,--only that Dr. Longley never in his
life was able to say an ill-natured word. Dr. Butler only became
Dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be Archbishop of
Canterbury.
I think it was in the autumn of 1831 that my mother, with the rest
of the family, returned from America. She lived at first at the
farmhouse, but it was only for a short time. She came back with a
book written about the United States, and the immediate pecuniary
success which that work obtained enabled her to take us all back to
the house at Harrow,--not to the first house, which would still have
been beyond her means, but to that which has since been called
Orley Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at
Harrow Weald. Here my schooling went on under somewhat improved
circumstances. The three miles became half a mile, and probably
some salutary changes were made in my wardrobe. My mother and
my sisters, too, were there. And a great element of happiness was
added to us all in the affectionate and life-enduring friendship
of the family of our close neighbour Colonel Grant. But I was never
able to overcome--or even to attempt to overcome--the absolute
isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground or racket-court
I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things
with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a covetousness
that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an
Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate
because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school-days
has clung to me all through life. Not that I have ever shunned to
speak of them as openly as I am writing now, but that when I have
been claimed as schoolfellow by some of those many hundreds who
were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that
I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in
