To Trollope-l
September 11, 1999
Re: The Proposed Calendar for Dr Thorne
As many of us know Dr Thorne was not one of those novels by Trollope which was serialised. It was his seventh novel, and although both The Warden and Barchester Towers attracted attention, readership, and, the latter especially, strong praise, it was this book which appears to have consolidated his reputation as (in David Skilton's words) 'a well-thought-of, widely-read novelist for the middle-class market'. Whether we are all agreed that such a reputation leads to a novelist's works being respected as serious or great works of art, what was true was that after Dr Thorne Trollope was 'made' as a man who could write sellable novels. Of the kind of praise Trollope received for Dr Thorne he wrote, it gave him 'the feeling . . . of a confident standing with the publishers . . . If I wrote a novel, I could certainly sell it' (Oxford Dr Thorne, ed DSkilton, p. xi).
As we begin Dr Thorne, and see the difference between the tongue-in- cheek satiric nature of The Warden and Barchester Towers and their emphasis on a sceptical appreciation of the church as a political institution and church doctrine as a instrument for gaining power over others and the strongly romantic and private story at the heart of Dr Thorne we could think about what exactly it is that appeals to a well-to-do middle-class market. I am thinking here also of the kind of praise given to recent books like Toni Morrison's Beloved whose text is not much different in many of its essentials from Trollope's.
Trollope told a famously dramatic story of how he got a better price for his book than had originally been offered him which both R. H. Super and John Sutherland have queried in some of its details. Apparently Trollope's memory conflated several happenings into one day to make the story more dramatic. However, if in the compression of events Trollope made a more dramatic than had actually occurred, the feel of his status at the time, his efforts to ratchet that up is accurate, and the switching of alliances of publishers and important move to Chapman and Hall are all accurate:
'I thought that I had now progressed far enough to arrange a sale while the work was still on the stocks. I went to Mr Bentley and demanded £400, -- for the copyright . He acceded, but came to me the next morning at the General Post Office to say that it could not be. He had gone to work at his figures after I had left him, and had found that £300 would be the outside value of the novel. I was intent upon the larger sum; and in furious haste, -- for I had but an hour then at my disposal, -- I rushed to Chapman and Hall in Picadilly, and said what I had to say to Mr Edward Chapman in a quick torrent of words which have since been spoken by me in that back-shop. Looking at me as he might have done at a highway robber who had stopped him on Hounslow Heath, he said that he supposed he might as well do as I desired. I considered this to be a sale, and it was a sale . . . (Oxford An Autobiography, intro & notes PDEdwards, p. 117).
The book came out in 1858 in 3 volumes of 47 chapters. Neither of the editions I own tell me where the divisions were. If someone has the most recent black Penguin that might have the original divisions. For now I will half-assume important turns between Chapters 14 and 15 and Chapters 30 and 31. The chapters in Dr Thorne are somewhat longer than those in Barchester Towers, so we slow down just a bit and go at a rate of 3-4 instead of 4-5 chapters a week, and take these turns into consideration, we have the following calendar:
For Dr Thorne:
Phase 1:
Phase 2:
Phase 3:
We could then decide whether we want to begin Cheers to all, To which Gene Stratton was kind enough to reply:
Ellen: Your assumptions would seem verified mathematically by comparing
Sadleir's Bibliography of the original 3 volumes of Dr. Thorne with the OUP
World's Classics edition (assuming of course the same type and spacing in
all 3 volumes). The former gives 305, 323, and 340 pages of text, totaling
968 pages. OUP has 47 chapters in 624 pages. Thus the ratio of OUP to
Sadleir's original is .644628 pages.
Multiplying Sadleir's text pages by this ratio, we get 197, 323, and 340 OUP
pages for the 3 original volumes. This is extremely close to having Vol. 1
end between chapters 14 and 15, Vol. 2 consisting of Chapters 15 through 30,
and Vol. 3 consisting of Chapters 31 through 47.
Gene Stratton
I thanked him:
This is to thank Gene for working out the pages in the Sadleir
Bibliography. I own it but am among the arithmetically challenged :).
I looked at the numbers of the pages and the numbers of the chapters,
and compared what Trollope had done in previous novels, but my sense
of where the volumes began and ended specifically was also the result
of reading the book and looking for some kind of definite break or
turn in the plot which also included time or place.
trom Trollope's letters, working papers and various
essays that have been written about his books (e.g. Mary Hamer's
and some of Sutherland's), we see that like other Victorian authors
Trollope shaped his fictions in accordance with the formulas
set for publication in the periodicals, Mudie's, and conventional
notions of how big one of three volumes should be. The closer
we come to following his pattern, the better we can appreciate
whatever suspense and other effects he is aiming at.
Cheers to all To Trollope-l
September 17, 1999
Re: Dr Thorne and the Landscape of Barset
Dr Thorne is one of those books by Trollope which has
never fallen out of print, and today exists in an abundance
of editions, the best of which are probably the recent
Penguin (1991 Ruth Rendell), Oxford World paperback
classics (1980 David Skilton), the Folio and Trollope
Society edition; Pan Books (1968 Arthur Calder-
Marshall). Then there is the Bantam; I see no Signet
in Tingay's list (A Collector's Catalogue, 1992 The
Trollope Society), but there is a listing for Doubleday
and that might be the Signet.
I have ordered the Penguin on the Net (as it
wasn't in my local Borders), but will use until it comes
an older edition which I am fond of: the 1959
Houghton Mifflin Riverside edition of
Dr Thorne, edited and introduced by Elizabeth
Bowen. Her essay is still one of better shorter
essays ever written upon Trollope: she has a
particular shared imaginative community with him
as they both also wrote books which belong to the
Anglo-Irish canon. Her essay on Sheridan Le Fanu's
Uncle Silas explicates elements in Trollope's
Anglo-Irish books -- and temperament in veins in
other of his pure English books. This is nearly
the first book I have read by Trollope; it is the first
one I remember well. It has a green and light
yellow cover.
Checking to see which language a book is translated
tells us something about which cultural audience
was thought to want to read it. Rachel Ray went into
Russian and French almost immediately. It is
a book about intimate social and psychological
feelings. Orley Farm was turned into Dutch, two different
German editions, with the French lagging just
a bit behind. It's a book about justice.
The Warden is today a favorite
among Italians! It's called A Case (with
implications of crisis) of
Consience (that's the title translated
back). Castle Richmond was translated
into no less than 5 languages the very year it was
published -- showing us perhaps the awareness
of other countries in Europe of how significant
was the Irish famine.
So I here record that 2 years after
the first publication of Dr
Thorne it was turned into Dutch,
a year later into Danish; two years later into
two different German translations and a French;
a year later another French. The Norwegians got
into the act in 1951, whereupon one of the German
translations was reprinted. Apparently the Russians
have remained unimpressed. Now that I know where
to buy Italian translations on the Net, I can report
that there is presently no translation of Dr Thorne
into Italian.
Another wrinkle in significance in the publication
data is the fact that Dr Thorne has not always
been treated as a wholly bona fide member of
the Barsetshire books. Although it was one of
the set produced in 1878 by Chapman and Hall
which included The Small House of Allington,
Trollope has a letter in which he thinks to himself
the only real Barset books are The Warden,
BT, The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire.
This registers Trollope's adhesion to the common
reader's feeling that the defining marks of a series
are repeating characters and a theme: in this
case Mr Harding, the Grantlys, Arabin and
Eleanor Bold, and the Proudies, with the Crawleys
coming in as the theme here is church politics
and religion -- of which there are none in Dr
Thorne. Pas de Mr Harding in Dr Thorne.
We can squeeze in Framley Parsonage as
a book about church politics and circling round
religion (Mark Robarts and Crawley are introduced
here, and it is Mark, a vicar's story).
Trollope himself in his Autobiography excluded
The Small House as belonging to the Pallisers:
it too lacks Grantlys, Proudies, and Mr Harding
makes only a cameo if important appearance.
Dr Thorne has again and again been printed
separately or with a slew of non-series novels
by Trollope when the central three (The Warden,
BT and The Last Chronicle) have not or have
only been printed as a tight-knight Barsetshire
group.
How is this? The maps of Barsetshire itself derive
first from Dr Thorne. It is in the opening chapter
of Dr Thorne that the place is first described in
loving detail. The inference is that merely reappearing
characters and a central theme are not the finally
defining characteristics of a series. Place is.
Landscape is. Perhaps mood too. The mood of Dr
Thorne is not tongue-in-cheek; it is not a droll
book except perhaps in a few wonderful Miss
Dunstable moments.
Trollope was a landscape novelist. (See
Juliet McMasters's book on the Pallisers, which
opens with a chapter on The Small House,
has a long chapter on the importance
landscape in all Trollope's novels. I
am now listening to Ayala's Angel: well in this book
there is a hunting sequence in which we find ourselves
in the landscape and among the characters of The
American Senator. The Ayala characters join the Ufford
and Ruffford Hunting club, and there we find Lord
Rufford (grow old, fat, and henpecked), Larry Twentyman,
Tony Tappit, and find ourselves visiting spots in and
about Dillsborough. Trollope is extending this imaginative
site towards Ayala's Angel. His Irish books all take
place in an area of Western and Southern Ireland
where he spent much time riding the countryside as
a postal surveyor. You can in fact draw a line around
the area, find it in real next to beautifully and
appropriately imagined places. Trollope dreamed of
an Australia cycle developed out of Lady Anna: alas,
the book was savaged by the conservative reviewers
of the time and did not please the kinds of readers
who could have afforded the first expensive set. So
no go.
Dr Thorne is a Barset book because it happens in
the same imagined area of Trollope's mind and all
that that area signifies to him, the area he called
Barsetshire and developed yet further in Framley
Parsonage and
The Last Chronicle of Barset. His reluctance to include
The Small House at Allington is based on his sense that
somehow the landscape is differently focused;
it includes Barset but is not simply that, or not
importantly that. It may be true that Adolphus Crosbie
passes through and spends a brief moment with
Mr Harding -- but it did Crosbie not a bit of
good. After all is not The Small House strongest
in its portrayal of Crosbie's betrayal of himself?
Cheers to all,
Ellen
Ellen
Ellen Moody
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