THE PRIME MINISTER (2 page)

The Golden Lion of Granpere

1873  Mill,
Autobiography

Settles in Montagu Square, London

Lady Anna
(–1874),
Phineas Redux
(–1874);
Australia and New Zealand
and
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life

1874  The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris

Hardy,
Far From the Madding Crowd

The Way We Live Now
(–1875)

1875  Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

Travels to Australia, via Brindisi,
Suez and Ceylon

Begins writing
An Autobiography
on his return.
The Prime Minister
(–1876)

1876  Mark Twain,
Tom Sawyer

Finishes writing
An Autobiography. The American Senator
(–1877)

1877 Henry James,
The American

Visits South Africa

Is He Popenjoy?
(–1878)

1878  Hardy,
The Return of the Native

Sails to Iceland

John Caldigate
(–1879),
The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye
(–1879) and
South Africa

1879  George Meredith,
The Egoist

Cousin Henry, The Duke’s Children
(–1880) and
Thackeray

1880  Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)

Benjamin Disraeli,
Endymion

Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex

Dr Worth’s School
and
The Life of Cicero

1881  In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed

Robert
Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island
(–1882)

Ayala’s Angel, The Fixed Period
(–1882) and
Marion Fay
(–1882)

1882  Phoenix Park murders in Dublin

Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December

Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough’s Family
(–1883) and
The Landleaguers
(–1883, unfinished)

1883  
An Autobiography
is published under the
supervision of Trollope’s son Henry

1884  
An Old Man’s Love

1923  
The Noble Filt

1927  
London Tradesmen
(reprinted from the
Pall Mall Gazette
, 1880)

1972  
The New Zealander

The Prime Minister
, which came out in parts from November 1875 to June 1876, was Trollope’s thirty-third novel, and the fifth in the series of six known as the Palliser novels, which began in 1864—5
with
Can You Forgive Her?
, and was to conclude in 1879–80 with
The Duke’s Children
. Although Parliament is the focus of the lives of many of the characters in these books, Trollope does not attempt the sort of treatment of political doctrine which Disraeli made his own. Instead the series presents the workings of a social world which centres on politicians and politics, including domestic and
sexual politics, but in the process says more about politics as a way of life than as ideological commitment. Running through these six novels is an account of the marriage of an ill-matched pair, presented with a wealth of interconnecting detail spanning the years during which Trollope, in his own words, was ‘manufacturing within my own mind the characters of the man and his wife’.
¹
The vivacious
and exceptionally wealthy Lady Glencora McCluskie was married off young to Plantagenet Palliser, the heir to a great dukedom, whose only promise was that he would be a worthy servant of his country, and whose greatest enthusiasm was working out the fine details of a plan to decimalize the currency. We are reminded that for a while he left politics and took a conscientious interest in conjugal
sex, getting quite to like it in fact, or at least recognizing the advantages of paternity. Marie Flynn, with a fine sense of the equivocal balance between social success and personal fulfilment in a woman’s marriage, commends the work of the young Glencora’s guardians in catching the future Duke, with an ironic ‘How well they did for you!’. Throughout the series, with the wife providing the verve
and the husband the brake on it, the Palliser marriage is a major connecting thread in one of the greatest extended fictions in the English language.

This series of novels is at once a large-scale presentation of mid-Victorian life and a deeply personal work:

By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters with their belongings
have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently I have used them for the expression of my political and social convictions.
²

Though never selling as well as Trollope’s earlier and immensely popular Chronicles of Barsetshire, the Palliser novels have been very successful with critics and a more limited readership ever since. The subject-matter was clearly more specialized. As Trollope remarks
of
Phineas Firm
,

It was not a brilliant success, – because men and women not conversant with political matters could not care much for a hero who spent so much of his time either in the House of Commons or in a public office. But the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish read it also. As this was what I had intended,
I was contented.
³

As these quotations from
An Autobiography
indicate, the Palliser series provided the author with an outlet ‘for the expression of my political and social convictions’.
⁴
This release was particularly valuable after 1868, when Trollope had unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in Yorkshire, and had seen his lifelong ambition to sit in the House of Commons frustrated.
Years before, when he had been no more than an ordinary Post Office clerk, an uncle of his had mocked his presumption in aspiring to this distinction, and the hurt inflicted by that sarcasm still lingered many years later. So it was appropriate that after his defeat at Beverley he should deliberately stress the political side of his fictional subject-matter: ‘As I was debarred from expressing
my opinions in the House of Commons,’ he explains, ‘I took this method of declaring myself.’s
⁵

The Prime Minister
is the key work in the Palliser series. Not only does Plantagenet Palliser rise to the highest office in the land, but in the course of the novel he articulates some of the author’s own political views, as ‘an advanced, but still a conservative Liberal’, and as we find them also expressed
in
An Autobiography
.
⁶
Trollope tells us that he had particularly exacting ambitions in relation to the character of Palliser, which he intended as a study of how far the realities of political life are compatible with a high sense of personal integrity. In his
Autobiography
, he describes the run-of-the-mill politicians whom he had hitherto foregrounded:

[T]he Brocks, De Terriers, Monks, Greshams,
and Daubeneys – had been more or less portraits, not of living men, but of living political characters. The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the Government or of the Opposition, had been very easy to describe… [A]s a rule, the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools… and can generally bear to be changed from this box into the
other, without, at any rate, the appearance of much personal suffering. Four-and-twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole, and work for one purpose, having each of them to set aside his own idiosyncrasy, and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve their country or their
own ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply, – as to whom I never cease to wonder that stones of such strong calibre should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles.

Plantagenet Palliser was to be something quite outstanding as a political character:

a Statesman of a different nature… a man who should be in
something perhaps superior, but in very much inferior, to these men… one who could not become a pebble, having too strong an identity of his own…. He should have rank, and intellect, and parliamentary habits by which to bind him to the service of the
country, – and he should also have unblemished, unextinguishable, inexhaustible love of country… as the ruling principle of his life; and it should
so rule him that all other things should be made to give way to it But he should be scrupulous, and, as being scrupulous, weak.
⁷

The proposition that the office of Prime Minister cannot be filled with complete success by a morally scrupulous person – and in Trollope’s view ‘Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, is a perfect gentleman’
⁸
– is perhaps not very original, but it effectively disturbs
any too easy assumptions we may make as to the morality of British public life, and of the constitutional compromise celebrated by Walter Bagehot. After all, the British system was intended to be run by gentlemen for gentlemen, and not by professional politicians for their like. If the office of Prime Minister could not be filled by such a one as Plantagenet Palliser, then by whom should it be
filled? And if the highest office in the land was morally equivocal in this way, what of lesser institutions? From an idealist’s point of view, the Britishness – or rather the Englishness – which the novel celebrates temporizes dangerously with worldly values. This, of course, would come as no surprise to the generations of the English rulers who knew that their constitution was founded in just this
sort of compromise. Victorian statesmen held it as dogma that the pragmatic English way was superior to French rhetoric and idealism, and the tyranny and bloodshed to which the latter were believed inevitably to lead. It was clearly better, in this view, to be ruled by gentlemen than by professional politicians. The Duke of St Bungay has a typically robust view of a gentleman’s need to overcome
his finer scruples and accept power, upbraiding the Duke of Omnium over the latter’s dislike of dealing in politics with dishonest men: ‘According to that the honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest may have everything their own way’
(p. 480)
. We meet a parallel to this argument of expediency in
The Warden
when Archdeacon Grantly tells the saintly Septimus Harding that
the older clergyman has a duty to go on drawing a comfortable income from the Church rather than leave it to be enjoyed by
somebody less upright In Trollope’s fictional universe, moral scruple is often difficult to reconcile with the exigencies of life in the world.

Such issues in the moral conduct of public life, rather than political principles themselves, are what Trollope delights in, for,
as Enoch Powell among others has complained,
⁹
politics as doctrine are not Trollope’s subject Nevertheless, the particular compound of materials in the Palliser novels has proved very successful. Trollope has been the favoured reading of a substantial number of politicians, including at least two Prime Ministers in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1878 the politician and historian
A.W. Kinglake acknowledged his enthusiasm in a letter to the author; ‘I am always mindful of the un-numbered hours of pleasure that I owe to your delightful books. And, apart from the pleasure, it is so good for one… to see the play of healthful English life as you with your genius present it.’
¹⁰
Few readers of a century or more later would think the matter was so uncomplicated. After all, some
of Trollope’s novels which are now most respected, such as
He Knew He Was Right
and
The Way We Live Now
, can scarcely be said to convey that ‘play of healthful English life’ that Kinglake picked out for special comment. Marital breakdown, kidnapping, insanity, ruthless speculation and cheating are more likely to have stuck in the modern reader’s memory. Of course it is probably true that a reader
like Kinglake would have regarded these particular books as unpleasant aberrations in the Trollopian canon, but later generations have found them typical of Trollope’s works, in most of which disturbing undercurrents are now detected.
The Prime Minister
is an interesting case. The novel seems clearly to celebrate what according to Victorian myth was the most quintessentially ‘English’ of social
groups, the squirearchy, whose virtues finally overcome the corrupt values of speculative capitalism. In the non-political plot, genteel Englishness is triumphant, an alien adventurer is expelled, and our English heroine rescued, while the political story-line tells us that although the practicalities of political life demand frequent moral compromise
and social discomfort, a man of the highest
rank can be found who for a brief interlude will bring to the office of Prime Minister an idealism which is rare amid the hurly-burly of government At first sight the evidence of
The Prime Minister
seems to be that there are great strengths in the English way of doing things, and great resilience in English political and social institutions.

A brief look at the institution of marriage in
The
Prime Minister
, however, should alert us to some unsettling features in the Trollopian universe. As so often in Victorian fiction, marriage is presented as the ideal career for a woman, and the culmination of her early struggles – so long, that is, as the spouse is responsible, English and of the landed or professional classes. Contracting an exogamous marriage nearly proves fatal for Emily Wharton,
who in an emergency can only put herself under the protection of her father, a well-to-do lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the law provides little protection for a wife against her husband, but even in its own terms, the operation of the institution sounds corrupt The legal system is always an important presence in Trollope’s novels, and in this case it is the source of the wealth which Ferdinand Lopez
wishes to acquire through his wife for speculative purposes. (In this,
The Prime Minister
dramatizes one aspect of the struggle between capitalism and the conservative values of the old professions.) Wharton himself, as a prominent barrister, should be ideally placed to protect his daughter, but he has to concede that Lopez is legally in the right in wishing to force her to accompany him to Guatemala,
and that she can probably be saved only because, given the respective social positions of himself and Lopez, it is unlikely that any court would enforce the law against his daughter. The law, that is, does next to nothing for the wives of tyrannical husbands, but courts and judges can be expected to be swayed by the social standing of a party to an action. It is true that the first of a series
of acts enlarging a married woman’s control over the assets she had brought into a marriage or earned since had been passed in 1870, shortly before the date of the action,
¹¹
but this was only the start of a reform still uncompleted a century later. A woman’s only protection – and a very partial defence it is – turns out to be that the men around her should behave ‘like gentlemen’.
The adequacy
of the law is shown to be one of the pious falsehoods society tells itself.