Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [1]
He was in the habit of writing in trains. If it had been possible, he would no doubt have written while riding his horse. He was hardly ever without a pen in his hand, though he put his work as a civil servant first. The man who was responsible for putting pillarboxes on our streets, he had first been in Ireland but in 1851 was sent home on a special job concerned with the rural delivery of letters. On horseback he rode about the West of England and Wales and ‘had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed’. Novelist that he already was, he was to use the knowledge of human nature and the rural scene thus gained in his fiction and to discover his potential.
By this time he had published three books, none of which had brought him success or any money. But in the course of this new job, while visiting Salisbury and walking about near the cathedral, he was struck by an idea for a story of clerical life. ‘From whence,’ he wrote, ‘came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans and archdeacons, was the central site.’ The public liked The Warden and it liked Barchester Towers, and for years to come these two novels brought him a small annual income. But before returning to Barchester it was of his own experiences as a junior clerk that he wrote in a piece of semi-autobiographical fiction called The Three Clerks. This completed, he was on holiday in Florence with his brother when for some reason not disclosed he asked him to suggest a plot. It was the only occasion on which he had recourse to another’s imagination for the thread of a story. The plot that Thomas Trollope offered him was that of Doctor Thorne.
Trollope himself had little to say about this novel, though more than twenty years later he noted that he believed it to be the most popular book that he had ever written. He finished it in Egypt and began work on The Bertrams on the following day. Of the two books, ‘I myself think that they are of about equal merit,’ he said, ‘but that neither of them is good… The plot of Doctor Thorne is good, and I am led therefore to suppose that a good plot – which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale – is mat which will most raise it or most condemn it in the public judgement… That of The Bertrams was more than ordinarily bad; and as the book was relieved by no special character, it failed. Its failure never surprised me; – but I have been surprised by the success of Doctor Thorne.’
Authors are often poor judges of their own work. Trollope considered the often tedious Phineas Finn and the very nearly unreadable Nina Balatka better novels than The Eustace Diamonds and The Small House at Allington. The kindest adjective applicable to The Bertrams is ‘unmemorable’, while its immediate predecessor was quickly judged by the public for the fine drama of wealth and wedlock it is, yet he saw no difference in merit between them.
Michael Sadlei, classifying Trollope’s novels and stories, gave Doctor Thorne three stars, an order of merit awarded to only four more out of all the fifty-one pieces of fiction. Of these he wrote, ‘There is not a loose end, not a patch of drowsiness, not a moment of false proportion.’1* It is hard to understand why it was disliked by its author. Perhaps the reason lay in the fact that the plot was not his own, or perhaps it was not suffidendy experimental for him. Trollope, not always felicitously, enjoyed writing of new or exotic places, introducing the occasional villainous foreigner, and believed, quite erroneously, that inserting a facetious sub-plot enhanced his fiction.
Happily for us today, there is none of that in Doctor Thorne. It is remarkable, if not unique, among his fiction for the absence in its chapters of convolutions and long-winded digressions. Here are no comic servants, no bibulous commercial travellers, as we find in the political fiction, no taproom wits or well-heeled jolly widows, only a modicum of rustic electioneering and not a single hunt. It is tempting to wonder if these may