Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [6]
Martha Dunstable makes her first appearance in Doctor Thorne. She will reappear again and again. For his models Trollope looked to the new prosperous manufacturing class, the captains of industry whose sons and daughters were getting themselves an education and assuming the manners and graces of the gentry, with funds to back up their pretensions. Miss Dunstable is the heiress to a pharmaceutical king, the now deceased purveyor of a panacea called the Ointment of Lebanon. We are told that he has left his huge fortune of two hundred thousand pounds – millions today – to his daughter.
Another such parvenu is Mr Moffat, the tailor’s son who crudely breaks his engagement to Augusta Gresham, thus giving Frank the opportunity to horsewhip him as he leaves his club. It is a thorough trouncing that Frank gives the man who has jilted his sister in a far more successful attack than that made by Johnny Eames on Adolphus Crosbie in a similar situation. Mr Moffat is a self-seeking, callous opportunist, and if we feel scant sympathy for Augusta, this is Only because she has cared for him no more than he cared for her. We suffer with her eventually, but not until we see her duped by her deceitful cousin. Miss Dunstable is a very different example of the second-generation nouveaux riches. If presumptuous in the reader, it is none the less natural to see her as one of those characters whom Trollope (the least constructive and calculating of writers) invented primarily as a distraction for Frank and a foil to Mary Thorne but who got out of hand and assumed a status among the principals, just as Mrs Proudie did.
Perhaps, then, it is no accident that these two women later become friends (or are described as friends by Miss Dunstable with her tongue in her cheek). In a later chronicle she is mentioned as referring to the Bishop’s wife ‘with almost unmeasured ridicule’, for Miss Dunstable’s humour is of the wry kind, ironic, not a little bitter. In her Trollope shows us the ugly and painful aspect of being a very rich young woman before the Married Women’s Property Acts. By the standards of the time Miss Dunstable was not even very young: she was thirty, and fussy young Frank, ‘no very great judge in such matters’, puts her down as forty. Trollope never tells us she is plain, but her high colour, large mouth and broad nose make a less than attractive picture. One of her instructors in fashion has told her that the crisp black curls she combs close around her face are ‘not the thing’, but she replies drily and with coarse but endearing wit, ‘They’ll always pass muster when they are done up with bank-notes.’
From the first we are aware that Miss Dunstable is very unlikely to marry anyone in Doctor Thorne. She is too clever to be caught by Honourable Georges or entrapped by their mothers. In fact, she will find a husband in the next Barsetshire novel. Trollope himself, scorning a mystery, would probably have revealed her future destiny at, say, Mary’s wedding, had he then thought of it. The reader is driven to conclude that he paired these two off because he needed a mate for each and could find no other incorruptible husband for Miss Dunstable nor a sufficiently clever, generous and jolly wife for his middle-aged hero. For it is Dr Thorne himself that she marries in Framley Parsonage.
Another family has climbed from rags to riches, and Sir Louis, the Scatcherds’ son, is the third in that