ABSTRACT
It is ironic, in a characteristically Trollopian way, that we can claim such limited certainty about the religious beliefs of a man who became famous as the novelist of the Church of England clergyman. 1 While thousands of contemporary readers felt that his novels accurately captured Anglican clergymen and their wives, Trollope stated that “no one at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to presume himself to be able to write about clergymen,” that he “never lived in any cathedral city, – except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman” ( Autobiography ch. 5). He was being falsely modest here, since “besides seven clerical ancestors by birth and seven clerical ancestors by marriage, [he] had at least nine clerical relatives sharing his surname and 14 other clerical relatives by marriage in his collateral family” (Durey 1). From boyhood he was more knowledgeable about and more interested in the ecclesiastical and political controversies that surrounded the Anglican Church than were the majority of Britons. He was deeply committed to maintaining the historical centrality of the Church of England to British society and culture. Moreover, no single fictional clergyman from the dozens portrayed in his novels fully represents either the author’s personal beliefs or an exclusive stance concerning Church politics. Perhaps the strongest public statement of faith that he ever made was in reference to the founding editorial principles of The Fortnightly Review , that “nothing should appear denying or questioning the divinity of Christ” ( Autobiography ch. 10). However, he accompanied this with a statement more broadly
representative of his views: “The matter on which we were all agreed was freedom of speech, combined with personal responsibility. We would be neither conservative nor liberal, neither religious nor free-thinking, neither popular nor exclusive” ( Autobiography ch. 10). This sort of dialectical balancing act – call it the Trollopian dialectic – is quintessential throughout his writings, but his oppositions seldom resolve into a comfortable synthesis but rather maintain an oscillation of positions while creating an occupiable space between them. Thus all attempts to pigeonhole him as High Church or Broad Church (Low Church never having been a serious contender) have ended in undecidability, and even where one can discern his leanings in regards to these positions his personal beliefs remain undisclosed. Trollope chose to keep his private thoughts on religion largely private, and this privateness is itself part of his position on religion. 2 Thus the Trollopian dialectic, combined with his choice to maintain a separation between the public and the private in these matters, has made the question of what he actually believed an enduring one.
