ABSTRACT
As a schoolboy at Harrow, Anthony Trollope, like his self-identified character from The Small House at Allington (1864), Johnny Eames, ‘knew much, – by far too much, – of Byron’s poetry by heart’ (148). To know too much of Byron’s writing portends a character’s susceptibility to Romanticism’s grand gestures, its deep pathos, its running after sublimity.1 Yet Trollope’s famous admirer of Byron, the delightful Lizzie Eustace of The Eustace Diamonds (1872), wants her corsair not only to ‘be rough with her’ but also to have ‘an island of his own in the Aegean Sea’ (405). Lizzie, in fact, has very little romantic sincerity and earnestness about her; she is not only an ambitious social climber and a genius at attracting and holding on to her capital, but she loves nothing more than to cleverly cheat and lie her way through whatever social difficulty confronts her. Another ‘shallow’ lady out for her own gain, Blanche Ingram of Jane Eyre (1847), informs Rochester that a ‘man is nothing without a spice of the devil in him’ and that a husband to her taste would be something of a ‘wild, fierce, bandit-hero’ (202): ‘Know that I doat on Corsairs’ (203), she pronounces, and goes on to remark, ‘An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit; and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate’ (209). Brontë means for the reader to see Blanche as ‘showy’ and ‘not genuine’; ‘she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books’ (210). Like Lizzie, Blanche develops a repertoire of fashionable ideas to be expressed at parties, and a series of performances to attract men. Thus to be sophisticated, with a dash of daring, is to express desire for a pirate lover.
