THE PRIME MINISTER (3 page)

Being married to ‘a perfect gentleman’ has its shortcomings too, as the Duchess has learnt over the years. It is scarcely necessary to rehearse the effects of the suffocating stereotypes imposed on even the most fortunate women by Victorian patriarchy: these things are now thoroughly documented; but the ways in which
Trollope’s texts register them are not all recognized. Many critics have assumed unquestioningly that the views which Abel Wharton holds on marriage receive authorial endorsement. Women, Wharton says, must choose their husbands cautiously from among their own social kind, so that they can ‘honour and obey’ them appropriately. Although a man may survive the breakdown of a marriage, a woman cannot possibly
do so. Once a woman is married, Wharton believes, she should remain married, whatever the circumstances: ‘If [a man] makes a mistake, it may be put right But with a woman’s marrying –
vestigia nulla retrorsum
. She has put off all her old bonds and taken new ones, which must be her bonds for life’
(p. 130)
.

There is nothing unusual in these views at the time. On the other hand the literary allusion
through which Wharton expresses them reveals things which are not officially acknowledged. Like many men of his educational background – including Trollope, his author – he has recourse to a tag from Horace to make his opinions resonate with his fellows. There was a habit of quotation from the classics, or from one of the Latin textbooks used at school, which used to reassure men of a certain
class of the essential rightness of things, the comprehensibility of the world and their ability to communicate with their fellow men. As often as not a tag was used as a sort of catch-phrase, out of conversational habit, with scant attention to its meaning in its original context, and Trollope is showing Mr Wharton using one in just that way. Both Wharton and his interlocutor are perfectly content
that they have communicated effectively, while reminding each other of their social standing by recalling their privileged schooling. What the text presents, however, is far more significant when the Latin words
vestigia nulla retrorsum
(‘none of the footprints lead back’) are interpreted in their context in the Epistle of Horace from which they come, and, although the fictional character is supposed
to be ‘unaware’ of the fact, the tag
actually provides a damaging comment on the very institution of marriage itself. In Horace’s Epistle (I.i), the prudent fox addresses the sick lion who has invited him to visit him and tend him: ‘The footprints frighten me, all leading towards your den, and none leading back.’ Wharton may intend to convey that a woman is destroyed if she walks out on her marriage,
but behind the facile use of the quotation there is the image of patriarchal marriage as a sick lion which entraps and consumes its victims. Women might well be frightened by the footprints.

Elsewhere Lopez obliquely expresses a rival myth about love and marriage when he quotes lines from
The Bride of Abydos
, one of Byron’s most passionate tales:

Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the
turtle,

Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!

In this poem a tyrannical father kills his daughter’s lover as she attempts to elope, and the daughter in that instant dies of grief
(p. 472)
. Lopez is here dramatizing himself as the romantic outsider, fighting against the archaic prejudice of the English Establishment. (It may be significant that in a letter Trollope refers to Lopez as ‘the
soi-disant hero’, as though it is not the text which confers the status of hero on the character, but the character who claims it for himself.)
¹²
In Lopez’s circumstances at that moment the quotation is ludicrously out of place, and the alien intruder is in any case well on the way to being vanquished. Yet we cannot be sure that we are not meant in part to accept Lopez as romantically attractive,
and to admire his energy and intelligence as a contrast to the ineptitude and conceit of the well-to-do young men among whom he lives, such as Everett Wharton, who is eventually found a role when he inherits a country estate, and his shortcomings are at a stroke translated into squirely perfection.

In fact the presentation of Lopez, well-educated, enterprising, eloquent and skilled in foreign
languages, anticipates a remark of George Meredith’s to the effect that ‘English women and men feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the
demerits of aliens – wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, and empty glitter, the sin of posturing’.
¹³
As John Fletcher says of Lopez, ‘He’s too clever, too cosmopolitan, – a sort of man whitewashed of all prejudices, who wouldn’t
mind whether he ate horseflesh or beef if horseflesh were as good as beef’
(p. 141)
. For most readers, the problem with Lopez is to decide whether it is the narrator or the other characters who hate him because he is an outsider. There is, after all, plenty of English immorality to go round, and we do not know if the narrator wants us to attribute Lopez’s to his Portuguese-Jewish origins. Does
all the racial prejudice in the novel belong solely to the other characters, or is the novelist behind the generally xenophobic and anti-semitic remarks and thoughts of many of the English characters? After all, a degree of xenophobia and anti-semitism (if anti-semitism admits of degrees) is part of the English Victorian identity, and Trollope was above all a recorder of contemporary Englishness.
But is he also a sharer in it? When the narrator refers to Lopez as ‘a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew’, with ‘a bright eye, and a hook nose, and a glib tongue’, he is not speaking for himself, but anticipating old Mrs Fletcher’s reactions when she shall hear of Emily’s love
(p. 136)
. As word of it spreads, the prejudice becomes even more grossly expressed, and
racial terms are enrolled to help other characters’
ad bominem
dislike. For example, Arthur Fletcher at first contradicts Sir Alured Wharton’s prejudiced racial description of Lopez, but then himself starts thinking of him as ‘greasy’. The slope from rivalry to racism is indeed slippery.

The trouble begins for the reader with the opening words of the novel:

It is certainly of service to a man
to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time.

This certainly is a level-headed assessment of how high-Victorian society worked, as we learn from
The Prime Minister
and as we also
know from extrinsic evidence.
Whether it is the narrator’s statement as to
how
things should be ordered we cannot tell. If it is, then we assume that throughout the novel all the prejudicial remarks about Ferdinand Lopez in particular, and Jews in general, derive from the narrator, and ultimately from Trollope. Yet this is not the only possibility. After all, for many years Trollope’s favourite novel was
Pride and Prejudice
, and these introductory words may have an equivocal status rather like that of Jane Austen’s most famous opening sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ We have no difficulty deciding that Jane Austen is being ironic, and that she would have us know that she is not implicated in the term ‘universally’. It is
possible that Trollope is equally distant from his opening remark, and that he is not one of those who suppose that one ought to have to know one’s grandparents in order to advance in the world.

As the novel progresses, we find that it is tirelessly concerned with questions of social standing and social conformity. Like so much of Trollope’s fiction it asks questions about belonging. Does Ferdinand
Lopez belong to the class of gentlemen? Is he fit to belong to gentlemen’s clubs; and is he fit to belong to the ultimate London club, Parliament?
The Prime Minister
presents a world in which social status is of enormous importance to the people inhabiting it. Rank, title and office obviously have much to do with determining social position, but the fictional society is not a rigid hierarchy.
The amount of attention paid to the question of where people stand is a clear sign of a social world full of people on the move. The inherited rules of precedence – establishing who walks in front of whom, and who leads whom to dinner – these are still in operation; but again and again social games are played out by the characters to determine or to reinforce their standing relative to each other,
and the lives of many Trollopian characters are comedies or tragedies of social acceptance or alienation.

In the world outside his novels, Trollope was a protagonist in just such a drama. Descended from landed gentry and related to a baronet, Anthony’s father brought the family perilously low through bankruptcy, clinging desperately to the educational and other trappings of gentility until rescued
by the literary earnings of the
resourceful Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother. During his miserable childhood and youth, Anthony himself nearly slipped over the precipice which divided middle-class respectability from disgrace. He was rescued by a lucky posting to Ireland, where he created an acceptable social persona for himself, and developed in confidence. He also began to write novels, which
were scarcely successful until the fourth,
The Warden
, attracted notice. Four more novels followed, building him a very respectable reputation and some sales, until finally his return to a more responsible post in England at the end of 1859 happily coincided with the launch of his first serial fiction, and he achieved immediate, sensational success with
Framley Parsonage
. Publishing fiction gave
him a feeling of social identity, when ‘people about me knew that I had written a book’.
¹⁴
A fuller sense of belonging which came when he was accepted in London’s clubland contrasted powerfully with the feelings of exclusion he had carried within him from his youth:

I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me, – a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my
school-days no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys…. And afterwards, when I was in London as a young man, I had but few friends…. It was not rill we had settled ourselves at Waltham that I really began to live much with others. The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular.
¹⁵

By dint of hard work
he had regained the social status his father had lost It is no wonder that all his life he retained an intense respect for work and a secure social standing. But the nostalgic appeal of the landed society he had only marginally experienced as a child also had a powerful hold over him. Only the pain of exclusion could make belonging so important.

Similar feelings are dramatized in his novels.
The desires to belong, to be recognized socially, and to enter Parliament are admirable, but the ‘correct’ way to achieve them’is through hard work. Excluded characters are vividly presented, and are often far
worthier than those who are in place in society. Yet running counter to any sentiments which might upset the social order is the nostalgia for a world of landed wealth and security – a land
Trollope had never really known, which may never have existed, and which would certainly have frustrated his energies grossly had he been condemned to live exclusively within it. It is no wonder that Ferdinand Lopez, like many adventurers, attracts some degree of sympathy by his resourcefulness and courage. Where, in contrast, would the world be if run entirely by Herefordshire squires? Yet finally
the novel comes to rest in a nostalgic picture of landed society. The ending, like that of most novels, embalms a fictional world for ever more, just as nostalgia preserves as a static vision what once was dynamic.

This ambivalence about Lopez is clear in
The Prime Minister
. What remains undetermined is the question of the author’s prejudice against Jews. His biographer, N.J. Hall, finds plenty
of evidence to show that neither in his life nor his fiction is he consistently unsympathetic towards Jews, though his fiction recognizes damaging racial stereotypes. Lopez summons up the traditional figure of the Jewish usurer with a reference to one of Shylock’s most famous speeches: ‘I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you,
drink with you, nor pray with you’
(p. 401)
. Yet he is the man who Arthur Fletcher complains has too few taboos – ‘a sort of man whitewashed of all prejudices’. Elsewhere Lopez turns the tables on English prejudice and casts himself in the role of Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice
when he claims that his ‘caravels are out at sea’
(p. 395)
. Here he is the open-hearted, open-handed man seeking financial
help from the miser. This certainly takes Lopez out of any literary stereotype, yet by doing this with conscious reference to Shylock,
The Prime Minister
simultaneously contradicts anti-semitic stereotypes and perpetuates them.

Although nobody doubts that
The Prime Minister
is one of Trollope’s important novels, there is less critical consensus about it than about any of his other works. From
the first there has been difference of opinion as to the relative importance of the two major strands of the story – the political plot and the story of Ferdinand Lopez’s attempt to establish himself in the world. The author himself – never
a reliable judge of his own work – expressed severe reservations about the Lopez plot when the novel was still coming out in parts: ‘[T] hough I myself am
prepared to stand up for the character of the Prime Minister, and for all his surroundings, I acknowledge the story of the soi-disant hero, Lopez, and all that has to do with him, to be bad.’
¹⁶
He is ready with the excuse that the political characters are ‘pure creations; and (as I think) the best I ever made. The Lopez part of the book has only been to me a shoe-horn for the other.’
¹⁷
The reviewer
in
The Times
agreed: