Recently in Trollope, Anthony Category

Yeah, pretty much.

If you're looking for a book about Americans who happen to be Senators, you could be excused for thinking you had hit the jackpot here. Despite the title, though, the American Senator is but a minor (though wonderfully bombastic) character in this book about life in the English country.

There are many other larger characters, including the scheming Arabella Trefoil, who is desperate to ensnare a husband and who almost succeeds in capturing the witless Lord Rufford. All Lord Rufford wants to do is to hunt foxes, and he almost ends up married to a woman he barely knows or likes! A little kiss in the back of a carriage, and the next thing you know a massive letter writing campaign is embarked upon to marry you off. It was clearly a difficult time to be a man back then.

Even worse for poor Lord Rufford, at one point, a fellow hunter falls off a horse and lays near death in Rufford's house on the very night a ball is to be held there! After much hemming and hawing, it is decided to have the ball anyway, on the utterly sensible premise that, "Though the man were to die why shouldn't the people dance?"

And then there's this passage:

And nobody in that house really cared much for Caneback [the man who was dying]. He was not a man worthy of much care. . . .  he had loved no one particularly, had been dear to no one in these latter days of his life, had been of very little use in the world, and had done very little more for society than any other horse-trainer! But nevertheless it is a bore when a gentleman dies in your house.

And indeed it is a bore. It's the sort of thing that can put a damper on your entire day. I was reading much of this while reading "War and Peace," which was great because Tolstoy would have long passages describing ghastly battle scenes. Meanwhile, Trollope would have long sections about party etiquette. It was a wonderful contrast. Trollope has become my bedtime reading of choice. His books are an entertaining and frivolous way to end that day, and I mean that in the best possible way.

And here's just one more quote to conclude this, because I love quoting Trollope. This is what one character says to her stepdaughter who just turned down a marriage proposal:

You are an idiot . . . an ungrateful idiot; and unless you think better of it, you'll repent your folly to your dying day. Who do you think is to come running after a moping slut like you?

So far, this has to be the classiest insult I have ever read with the word "slut" in it. Granted, it mainly meant "an untidy person" back then, but Trollope's characters clearly knew how to tell somebody off.

This is just a wonderful book, although it is a bit odd. The plot seems almost incidental to the novel, and the most dramatic parts aren't even at the end. For me, the villain Ferdinand Lopez ("To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain.") is far more interesting than the titular character, the Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium. And to be honest, I don't even know who the protagonist is. There are about three or four different possibilities, although if it's the Duke he must be the most passive protagonist ever.

Perhaps the book seems so strange to me because it's the fifth in a series of six novels, the Palliser Novels. I didn't realize that when I picked this up. The story itself is compact enough, but many of the characters come from other novels. The Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, was already a much-loved character when this was written, so it makes sense that Trollope doesn't waste a lot of time setting him up.

And yet, despite all this, the book is completely delightful. There's a subtle, wry humor in here that made me want to be Anthony Trollope when I grow up. Therefore, instead of writing about the book, I'm just going to quote some of my favorite parts.

I especially love the Victorian insults. Next time I'm in an argument, I want to remember this: "I think, Sir, that your proposition is the most unbecoming and the most impertinent that ever was addressed to me." Yeah, well, F you too.

And here's the Victorian way to tell someone that you're about to kick his ass, in letter form:

Sir,
Before this election you were guilty of gross impertinence in writing a letter to my wife -- to her extreme annoyance and to my most justifiable anger. Any gentleman would think that the treatment you had already received at her hands would have served to save her from such insult, but there are men who will never take a lesson without a beating. And now, since you have been here, you have presumed to offer to shake hands with me in the street, though you ought to have known that I should not choose to meet you on friendly terms after what has taken place. I now write to tell you that I shall carry a horsewhip while I am here, and that if I meet you in the streets again before I leave the town I shall use it.

Personally, I don't know if I could hold a grudge long enough to write a letter about it. I suppose this technique would help in reducing violence. It's like homework for your grudges. If you had to write a letter every time you wanted to beat someone up, you would probably think twice about it.

And finally, here's Anthony Trollope on the current financial crisis:

Sexty's fears were greatly exaggerated by the feeling that the coffee and guano [they were trading] were not always real.... His partner, indeed, was of the opinion that ... there was no need at all for real coffee and guano, and explained his theory with considerable eloquence. "If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as though we were to back our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn't have coffee and you needn't have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or the guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession."

This amused me even before I learned that guano is fertilizer, essentially bird dung. One man's guano is another man's mortgage-backed derivative.