Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [5]
‘We are in the same boat,’ [says Mary] ‘and you shan’t turn me overboard.’
‘But if I were to the, what would you do then?’
‘And if I were to the, what would you do? People must be bound together. They must depend on each other. Of course, misfortunes may come; but it is cowardly to be afraid of them beforehand. You and I are bound together, uncle; and though you say these things to tease me, I know you do not wish to get rid of me.’
Perhaps she owes her self-confidence and good manners to the education she has received in the Gresham schoolroom – and her pride. It is unlikely that her modesty and generosity of spirit derive from the same source. Beatrice Gresham, it is true, the second daughter and Mary’s best friend, is a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, but Augusta, the eldest, has all the hauteur and slavish devotion of her cousins, the de Courcys, to rank and blood. Indeed, Lady Amelia de Courcy is her mentor as well as her cousin, a treacherous adviser who finally grabs for herself the suitor she has bidden Augusta reject on grounds of disparity of class. Lady Amelia, Trollope tells us, would have rejected heaven itself unless she could have had prior assurance of a seat in the Upper House. All the de Courcy women, with Lady Arabella Gresham and Augusta, are in alliance against Mary Thorne. She is (apparently) poor. No one knows where she comes from, and therefore they believe the worst. They are the sort of people who generally do believe the worst and do not balk at expressing it aloud. Trollope brought this aristocratic family back again in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle. Like many authors, he was captivated by his own minor portraits and unable to resist re-encountering them, their conversation and their manners.
‘A great deal of Mr Trollope’s popularity is perhaps attributable to the care he has generally taken to fill his stories with nice people,’ wrote one reviewer in 1865. The de Courcys are not nice. Some of the utterances of the Countess probably shock us today more than they shocked contemporary readers. ‘Is it not a waste of time?’ she says briskly of Frank’s proposal to complete his education at Cambridge, and, of his matrimonial prospects, ‘Frank must marry money. I hope he will understand this early… When a man thoroughly understands this, when he knows what his circumstances require, why, the matter becomes easy to him.’ To be fair to the Countess, she has had a terrible time of it at home. She ‘thought over in her mind injuries of a much graver description than her sister-in-law had ever suffered’. Later on, in The Small House at Allington, her eldest son describes the likelihood of her husband’s murdering her.
It is another son who, when his cousin Frank says of his own parent, ‘His father, you know, died when he was very young,’ replies, ‘Yes; I know he had a stroke of luck that doesn’t fall to everyone…’, thus incurring Frank’s disgust. By contrast Squire Gresham is one of the nice people of the novel, a man who married in youthful haste and repented during a long, increasingly penurious leisure. Having the hounds at Greshamsbury – ‘those nasty dogs!’ – has impoverished him, along with political aspirations and keeping up the Gresham town house in Portman Square. His weaknesses, his enfeeblement under the cold winds that have blown upon him from the Courcy Castle quarter, are for Trollope a contrast to Dr Thorne’s strength, the iron will and stubborn pride that have so influenced and affected Mary, forming her own character. The great difference between a balanced, generous and imaginative nature and de Courcy' shallowness is never more admirably shown than in the relative attitudes towards Mary Thorne of Squire Gresham and his daughter Beatrice on the one hand and those of Lady Arabella and her relatives on the other. The Squire and Beatrice are equally fixed in