Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
three months after the time named." In these emergencies I have
given perhaps half what was wanted, and have refused to give the
other half. I have endeavoured to fight my own battle fairly, and
at the same time not to make myself unnecessarily obstinate. But
the circumstances have impressed on my mind the great need there is
that men engaged in literature should feel themselves to be bound
to their industry as men know that they are bound in other callings.
There does exist, I fear, a feeling that authors, because they are
authors, are relieved from the necessity of paying attention to
everyday rules. A writer, if he be making (pounds)800 a year, does not think
himself bound to live modestly on (pounds)600, and put by the remainder
for his wife and children. He does not understand that he should
sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers
and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to
the letter;--but that he, as a brain-worker, and conscious of the
subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from
bonds when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration
which will not always come,--especially will not come if wine-cups
overnight have been too deep. All this has ever been odious to
me, as being unmanly. A man may be frail in health, and therefore
unable to do as he has contracted in whatever grade of life. He who
has been blessed with physical strength to work day by day, year
by year--as has been my case--should pardon deficiencies caused
by sickness or infirmity. I may in this respect have been a little
hard on others,--and, if so, I here record my repentance. But
I think that no allowance should be given to claims for exemption
from punctuality, made if not absolutely on the score still with
the conviction of intellectual superiority.
The Vicar of Bullhampton was written chiefly with the object of
exciting not only pity but sympathy for fallen woman, and of raising
a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I
could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To
have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed
to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be
a second-rate personage in the tale;--but it was with reference to
her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with
their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a
preface,--in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old-established
principle. I do not know that any one read it; but as I wish to
have it read, I will insert it here again:--
"I have introduced in the Vicar of Bullhampton the character of a
girl whom I will call,--for want of a truer word that shall not in
its truth be offensive,--a castaway. I have endeavoured to endow
her with qualities that may create sympathy, and I have brought
her back at last from degradation, at least to decency. I have not
married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavoured to explain
that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still
things could not be with her as they would have been had she not
fallen.
"There arises, of course, the question whether a novelist, who
professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes,
should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as
that of Carry Brattle. It is not long since,--it is well within the
memory of the author,--that the very existence of such a condition
of life as was hers, was supposed to be unknown to our sisters and
daughters, and was, in truth, unknown to many of them. Whether that
ignorance was good may be questioned; but that it exists no longer
is beyond question. Then arises the further question,--how far the
conditions of such unfortunates should be made a matter of concern
to the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness
of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us. Cannot women,
who are good, pity the sufferings of the vicious, and do something
perhaps to mitigate and shorten them without contamination from the
vice? It will be admitted probably by most men who have thought
upon the subject that no fault among us is punished so heavily
as that fault, often so light in itself but so terrible in its
consequences to the less faulty of the two offenders, by which a
woman falls. All of her own sex is against her, and all those of
the other sex in whose veins runs the blood which she is thought
to have contaminated, and who, of nature, would befriend her, were
her trouble any other than it is.
"She is what she is, and she remains in her abject, pitiless,
unutterable misery, because this sentence of the world has placed
her beyond the helping hand of Love and Friendship. It may be said,
no doubt, that the severity of this judgment acts as a protection
to female virtue,--deterring, as all known punishments do deter, from
vice. But this punishment, which is horrible beyond the conception
of those who have not regarded it closely, is not known beforehand.
Instead of the punishment, there is seen a false glitter of gaudy
life,--a glitter which is damnably false,--and which, alas I has
been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of
young girls, than have those horrors which ought to deter, with
the dark shadowings which belong to them.
"To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex,
as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life
is, happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice
and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be
handled with truth to life, some girl, who would have been thoughtless,
may be made thoughtful, or some parent's heart may be softened."
Those were my ideas when I conceived the story, and with that
feeling I described the characters of Carry Brattle and of her
family. I have not introduced her lover on the scene, nor have I
presented her to the reader in the temporary enjoyment of any of
those fallacious luxuries, the longing for which is sometimes more
seductive to evil than love itself. She is introduced as a poor
abased creature, who hardly knows how false were her dreams, with
very little of the Magdalene about her--because though there may
be Magdalenes they are not often found--but with an intense horror
of the sufferings of her position. Such being her condition, will
they who naturally are her friends protect her? The vicar who has
taken her by the hand endeavours to excite them to charity; but
father, and brother, and sister are alike hard-hearted. It had
been my purpose at first that the hand of every Brattle should be
against her; but my own heart was too soft to enable me to make
the mother cruel,--or the unmarried sister who had been the early
companion of the forlorn one.
As regards all the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told.
The characters are true, and the scenes at the mill are in keeping
with human nature. For the rest of the book I have little to say.
It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very good. As I have
myself forgotten what the heroine does and says--except that she
tumbles into a ditch--I cannot expect that any one else should
remember her. But I have forgotten nothing that was done or said
by any of the Brattles.
The question brought in argument is one of fearful importance. As
to the view to be taken first, there can, I think, be no doubt. In
regard to a sin common to the two sexes, almost all the punishment
and all the disgrace is heaped upon the one who in nine cases out
of ten has been the least sinful. And the punishment inflicted is
of such a nature that it hardly allows room for repentance. How is
the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?
Then comes the answer: It is to the severity of the punishment alone
that we can trust to keep women from falling. Such is the argument
used in favour of the existing practice, and such the excuse
given for their severity by women who will relax nothing of their
harshness. But in truth the severity of the punishment is not known
beforehand; it is not in the least understood by women in general,
except by those who suffer it. The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty,
the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all
good things, the banishment from honest labour, the being compassed
round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the
weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant,--and then
the quick depreciation of that one ware of beauty, the substituted
paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres,
hunger, thirst, and strong drink, life without a hope, without the
certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease,
starvation, and a quivering fear of that coming hell which still
can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here! This is the
life to which we doom our erring daughters, when because of their
error we close our door upon them! But for our erring sons we find
pardon easily enough.
Of course there are houses of refuge, from which it has been
thought expedient to banish everything pleasant, as though the only
repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily
be one of sackcloth and ashes. It is hardly thus that we can hope
to recall those to decency who, if they are to be recalled at
all, must be induced to obey the summons before they have reached
the last stage of that misery which I have attempted to describe.
To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this,--that
the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind if
possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed,
and that this ferocity comes not only from hatred of the sin, put
in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with
it. Very low as is the degradation to which a girl is brought when
she falls through love or vanity, or perhaps from a longing for
luxurious ease, still much lower is that to which she must descend
perforce when, through the hardness of the world around her,
she converts that sin into a trade. Mothers and sisters, when the
misfortune comes upon them of a fallen female from among their
number, should remember this, and not fear contamination so strongly
