Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [3]
As an alternative tide, he tells us in the first chapter, we may if we so desire have The life and Loves of Francis Newbold Gresham – that is, if a middle-aged medical man is not acceptable as hero. That Thomas Thorne – named perhaps for his progenitor, Anthony’s brother Thomas? – is far from unacceptable soon emerges; his combination of an advanced liberalism with a secret snobbery is interesting in itself, and he has ‘within him an inner, stubborn, self-admiring pride… a special pride in keeping his pride silently to himself’. Though not himself a parent, he has that quality seen in the best of Trollope’s fathers, a peculiar womanly sweetness and tenderness towards their girl children. But he is a strong man. He stands up to everyone. He is just and high-principled. In our day the general practitioner, which is more or less what Dr Thorne was, is one of the most respected members of the community. It was not always so. Were it not for the Thorne of Ullathorne blood, it is doubtful if the doctor would even have dined at Greshamsbury. As it is, he is there on a kind of sufferance, but nevertheless he champions his niece with passion when Frank’s mother pronounces a sentence of exile on her.
‘Do you think that I will break bread in a house from whence she has been ignominiously banished? Do you think that I can sit down in friendship with those who have spoken of her as you have now spoken? You have many daughters; what would you say if I accused one of them as you have accused her?’
‘Accused, doctor! No, I don’t accuse her. But prudence, you know, does sometimes require us –’
‘Very well; prudence requires you to look after those who belong to you; and prudence also requires me to look after my one lamb. Good morning, Lady Arabella.’
The doctor is brave. He is chivalrous and gallant, generous and shrewd. He would fulfil nearly all the requirements of a hero were Frank Gresham less handsome, less charming and less obviously heroic than he is. But Frank is probably the most attractive young male protagonist Trollope ever created.
If the preceding Barsetshire novels have heroes at all, they must be the priggish John Bold of The Warden, marked for an early death, and the maidenly don of Bereitester Towers, Francis Arabin, whom Bold’s widow will marry. So many of those who may be more accurately called the young male leads in the novels that follow either share what Trollope himself called a ‘hobbledehoy-ness’, perhaps best exemplified in Johnny Eames of The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, or have an even less attractive predilection to vacillation in matters of love. Major Grantly in The Last Chronicle, though with a plain duty to rescue Grace Crawley and marry her out of hand, is ridiculously dependent on his father’s whim for an income. Frank Greystock of The Eustace Diamonds abandons Lucy Morris to her fate as a governess and is flagrantly unfaithful to her with his cousin Lizzie. Even Trollope himself said of the hero of Framley Parsonage, ‘I know it will be said of Lord Lufton… that, putting aside his peerage and broad acres and handsome, sonsy face, he was not worth a girl’s care and love.’
But when he created Frank Gresham he was relatively new to the business of hero-making. He did not And it necessary to ascribe to this young man as a chief fault that ‘he was so young’, as he later did to Peregrine Orme in Orley Farm, or bestow on him as among ‘frolics of which he had been guilty’ the liberating of a bag full of rats into the college hall at dinner time. For this and other like offences young Orme was sent down from his university, but Frank desperately wants to return to Cambridge in October, and this in opposition to the wishes of his mother and aunt who would have him stay at home and sell himself to an heiress.
From the first Frank is not interested