ABSTRACT
TOWARDS THE END of Trollope’s novel The Prime Minister (1876) the Duke of Omnium takes his cabinet colleague Phineas Finn to his favourite view on his estate of Matching. Omnium’s coalition government is falling apart; he is alienated from his ambitious and tactless wife; he will never be prime minister again. As they walk, the Duke haltingly explains his political philosophy to the young Irishman, who doesn’t much like it. The Duke talks about equality. He envisages a time when the condition of a future duke and that of his coachman will converge. Finn implies his dissent. ‘By equality?’ he asks. ‘The millennium’, answers the Duke, ‘…is so distant we need not even think of it as possible’; and Finn, who has painfully pulled himself up over six volumes from the doctor’s surgery of Killaloe, in the west of Ireland, to the Cabinet and marriage with a wealthy widow, can draw breath. ‘Equality would be a heaven, if we could obtain it’, the Duke continues, ‘How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of the country, and say that it is all as it ought to be?’ The Duke looks up into the clouds and, lost for words, sits down. ‘Equality is a dream. But sometimes one likes to dream-especially as there is no danger that Matching will fly away from me in a dream…’1
I quote this episode because, although it’s a discussion of political ideology-and, indeed, an expertly ‘composed’ view of the well-heeled humanitarianism of the English ruling class, from Gladstone to Prince Charles-it can only be conveyed by fiction. The fumbling, fudging discourse of the Duke, the setting and the metaphors both for morally necessary social change and the possessions on which Omnium’s power depends, the scepticism of the younger career politician: all give a density and solidity far beyond conventional political writing. If we want to understand why the political theme has been so strong in English literature, this is the obvious place to start.
