Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in
estrangement.
Through all my father's troubles he still desired to send me either
to Oxford or Cambridge. My elder brother went to Oxford, and Henry
to Cambridge. It all depended on my ability to get some scholarship
that would help me to live at the University. I had many chances.
There were exhibitions from Harrow--which I never got. Twice I tried
for a sizarship at Clare Hall,--but in vain. Once I made a futile
attempt for a scholarship at Trinity, Oxford,--but failed again. Then
the idea of a university career was abandoned. And very fortunate
it was that I did not succeed, for my career with such assistance
only as a scholarship would have given me, would have ended in debt
and ignominy.
When I left Harrow I was all but nineteen, and I had at first gone
there at seven. During the whole of those twelve years no attempt
had been made to teach me anything but Latin and Greek, and very
little attempt to teach me those languages. I do not remember
any lessons either in writing or arithmetic. French and German I
certainly was not taught. The assertion will scarcely be credited,
but I do assert that I have no recollection of other tuition
except that in the dead languages. At the school at Sunbury there
was certainly a writing master and a French master. The latter was
an extra, and I never had extras. I suppose I must have been in
the writing master's class, but though I can call to mind the man,
I cannot call to mind his ferule. It was by their ferules that I
always knew them, and they me. I feel convinced in my mind that I
have been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just
possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and
I have often boasted that I obtained them all. Looking back over
half a century, I am not quite sure whether the boast is true; but
if I did not, nobody ever did.
And yet when I think how little I knew of Latin or Greek on leaving
Harrow at nineteen, I am astonished at the possibility of such
waste of time. I am now a fair Latin scholar,--that is to say, I
read and enjoy the Latin classics, and could probably make myself
understood in Latin prose. But the knowledge which I have, I have
acquired since I left school,--no doubt aided much by that groundwork
of the language which will in the process of years make its way
slowly, even through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition
in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left
Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and,
I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation
upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used
to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to
the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,--except
the way in which I licked the boy who had to be taken home to be
cured.
CHAPTER II MY MOTHER
Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of
all the Trollopes, I must say a few words of my mother,--partly
because filial duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent
who made for herself a considerable name in the literature of her
day, and partly because there were circumstances in her career
well worthy of notice. She was the daughter of the Rev. William
Milton, vicar of Heckfield, who, as well as my father, had been
a fellow of New College. She was nearly thirty when, in 1809, she
married my father. Six or seven years ago a bundle of love-letters
from her to him fell into my hand in a very singular way, having
been found in the house of a stranger, who, with much courtesy,
sent them to me. They were then about sixty years old, and had been
written some before and some after her marriage, over the space of
perhaps a year. In no novel of Richardson's or Miss Burney's have
I seen a correspondence at the same time so sweet, so graceful,
and so well expressed. But the marvel of these letters was in the
strange difference they bore to the love-letters of the present
day. They are, all of them, on square paper, folded and sealed,
and addressed to my father on circuit; but the language in each,
though it almost borders on the romantic, is beautifully chosen,
and fit, without change of a syllable, for the most critical eye.
What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her
lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction? She dearly likes
a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire familiarity with
a new and strange being. There is something in that, too, pleasant
to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not conduce
to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer
of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her
to the last.
In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of
six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages.
My elder sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives;
but she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals
during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to
her,--with the destiny before us three of writing more books than
were probably ever before produced by a single family. [Footnote:
The family of Estienne, the great French printers of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, of whom there were at least nine or ten,
did more perhaps for the production of literature than any other
family. But they, though they edited, and not unfrequently translated
the works which they published, were not authors in the ordinary
sense.] My married sister added to the number by one little anonymous
high church story, called Chollerton.
From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went
to America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the
world. She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal role
and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from
the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles.
An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from
the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate,
or a French proletaire with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to
the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality
of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had
been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that
archduchesses were sweet. But with her politics were always an affair
of the heart,--as, indeed, were all her convictions. Of reasoning
from causes, I think that she knew nothing. Her heart was in
every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so
thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she
generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic; but it
must be acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now her
books, and can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best
were Dante and Spenser. But she raved also of him of whom all such
ladies were raving then, and rejoiced in the popularity and wept
over the persecution of Lord Byron. She was among those who seized
with avidity on the novels, as they came out, of the then unknown
Scott, and who could still talk of the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth.
With the literature of the day she was familiar, and with the poets
of the past. Of other reading I do not think she had mastered much.
Her life, I take it, though latterly clouded by many troubles, was
easy, luxurious, and idle, till my father's affairs and her own
aspirations sent her to America. She had dear friends among literary
people, of whom I remember Mathias, Henry Milman, and Miss Landon;
but till long after middle life she never herself wrote a line for
publication.
In 1827 she went to America, having been partly instigated by the
social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember,--a
certain Miss Wright,--who was, I think, the first of the American
female lecturers. Her chief desire, however, was to establish
my brother Henry; and perhaps joined with that was the additional
object of breaking up her English home without pleading broken
fortunes to all the world. At Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio,
she built a bazaar, and I fancy lost all the money which may have
been embarked in that speculation. It could not have been much, and
I think that others also must have suffered. But she looked about
her, at her American cousins, and resolved to write a book about
them. This book she brought back with her in 1831, and published
it early in 1832. When she did this she was already fifty. When
doing this she was aware that unless she could so succeed in making
money, there was no money for any of the family. She had never before
earned a shilling. She almost immediately received a considerable
sum from the publishers,--if I remember rightly, amounting to two
sums of (pounds)400 each within a few months; and from that moment till
nearly the time of her death, at any rate for more than twenty
years, she was in the receipt of a considerable income from her
writings. It was a late age at which to begin such a career.
The Domestic Manners of the Americans was the first of a series
of books of travels, of which it was probably the best, and was
certainly the best known. It will not be too much to say of it that
it had a material effect upon the manners of the Americans of the
day, and that that effect has been fully appreciated by them. No
observer was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects
or even of the happiness of a young people. No one could have been
worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation
was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women
do, from her own standing-point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes,
it ought to be ugly to all eyes,--and if ugly, it must be bad.
What though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear, if they
put their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters?
The Americans were to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar,--and she
told them so. Those communistic and social ideas, which had been so
pretty in a drawing-room, were scattered to the winds. Her volumes
were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the
