ABSTRACT
The passages quoted above show how easy it is to experience Anthony Trollope as offering self-enclosed worlds peopled by inhabitants largely unconscious of the rules that govern their surroundings. Such perceptions arise in part because Trollope rarely takes the position of omniscient commentator, who, like the giant in Hawthorne’s image or the anthropologist implicit in Herbert’s, looks down at social interactions from a distance, explaining their significance. Trollope refuses, as Henry James notes, “to take the so-called scientific view,” choosing instead to describe, “the life that lay nearest to him.”3 His narratives focus on individuals in the midst of events, caught up in negotiating a world of everyday objects, partly grasping and partly avoiding a full understanding of the material forces that were impacting their culture, forces that, most often and most infamously, in terms of Trollope’s later reputation, involved money. In the reading that follows, I argue that this “near” view allowed Trollope to be surprisingly astute about the contradictory psychological motivations, both spoken and unspoken, that shaped late Victorian society’s conceptions of its own material practices. Trollope links his characters’ individual psychological reactions to Victorian social history through the practice of referencing actual historical figures. We know that in the
Palliser novels, Gresham stands for Gladstone, Daubeny for Disraeli. I explore here a connection less obvious to us than it would have been to the Victorians, the similarities between the ointment heiress Miss Dunstable, who appears in three of the Barsetshire novels,4 and the patent medicine magnate, Thomas Holloway.5 Tracing the resonances between Trollope’s fictional representation and depictions of a contemporary historical figure, I find a similar set of rhetorical and psychological images governing both, images that allow us to map out the complexity of nineteenth-century reactions to economic changes that were experienced as transforming the terrain of English society.
