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FRAMLEY PARSONAGE by Anthony Trollope
Jan. 24th, 2014 10:26 pmMark Robarts is a young vicar given a good salary and position by his patron Lady Lufton, the mother of his schoolfriend Lord Lufton. But Robarts is drawn into higher society than his funds can support, and then he's inveigled into signing bills worth his entire year's salary for a high-society scammer, Sowerby, a member of Parliament. Robarts goes on an agonising journey of character development due to this imprudence. Meanwhile, Mark's orphaned sister Lucy Robarts falls in love with Lord Lufton, who is encouraged to marry Archdeacon Grantly's daughter Griselda instead, while the indefatigable Mrs Proudie cameos in clerical intrigue. Other old Barchester friends such as Miss Dunstable recur in a delightful reading experience.
This sort of plot hits my id-fic financial-insecurity buttons hard. I'm not sure exactly why I have those buttons, but Victorian novels about people teetering on the edges of financial ruin - even when 'ruin' to them still means 'so poor they only have one servant and are by definition better off than the servant' - motivate me to some serious nail-biting frenzies.
This is a good passage about the psychology of entitlement: Mark Robarts has prospered mostly because of his hardworking father and his friendship with Lord Lufton and Lord Lufton's mother, Lady Lufton.
He had obtained a living at an age when other young clergymen are beginning to think of a curacy, and he had obtained such a living as middle-aged parsons in their dreams regard as a possible Paradise for their old years. Of course he felt that he was different from other parsons.
Now Mark Robarts is intent on mixing with high society - perhaps it'll eventually get him a bishopric. But in the course of his mixing, he's persuaded to sign a bill for four hundred pounds that he doesn't have, by the entirely unscrupulous Sowerby. Robarts' complacency and weakness makes the reader feel he deserves a lesson, but the narrative raises a lot of human sympathy for him.
There's another excellent passage about Robarts' mindset here, regarding human tendency to apply the sunk costs fallacy even when we really shouldn't. For people like Robarts it's not easy to turn back after a path has been started.
But at last he did sign the bill, and sent it off, as Sowerby had directed. What else was he to do?
Fool that he was. A man always can do right, even though he has done wrong before. But that previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.
Trollope has strong words to say about the grinding effects of poverty, which ring more true than Charles Dickens' perfect saints in ragged clothing. Trollope's own life contains brushes with financial insecurity - his mother, Frances Trollope, had to support the family by writing novels, and Trollope himself had a bad experience with debt in his early years in the public service. (It's possible that insubordinate, unpunctual, impecunious clerk Crocker in MARION FAY is a particularly unflattering self-portrait!) Crawley is a bitter man, and Mrs Crawley is a good but human woman; in their years of living on the poor salary of a perpetual curate they find themselves abandoning prior scruples and old refinements. Crawley gives in to bitterness and deprives his family, while his wife lies and cheats to accept charity he doesn't know about. Sometimes fine feelings are a luxury as much as anything else.
FRAMLEY PARSONAGE can be read for a classist moral: do not mix too much with those above your station in life. But Trollope has terrible bluebloods and decent tailors in his corpus of works. Humankind eternally struggles with the question, to always reach for a higher goal but never reach too much. Or, alternatively, the novel can be read to say that Robarts' higher goal is not so high: intercourse with not-terribly-scrupulous worldly society. The narrative expresses this moral as the proverb about touching pitch leaving a stain on your clothes. Robarts is also employed in something of a sinecure, where he gets an excellent income for relatively light pastoral duties - and makes choices that further lighten his load. Robarts hasn't got enough to do in his real job and gets into trouble as a result, which is a pronouncement we'd still find reasonable today.
Lucy Robarts stands out as the heroine: a young lady who's attractive because of her interesting personality more than her beauty. Lucy is reclusive by nature, which makes her a fascinating mystery to other characters: intelligent, independent, and not in the least in need of others' valuation to prove herself. She also has the tendency to make facetious jokes about the things that are most painful to her, which endears her to the reader. Griselda Grantly, daughter of Archdeacon and Mrs Grantly, forms the foil to Lucy, and in the narrative she is interestingly shallow and inhuman - a young lady so beautiful that she seems to be made of marble, and correspondingly like marble she's cold, stiff, and extremely opaque. In contrast to Lucy, the narrative doesn't dare to explore what goes on inside Griselda, if anything in fact does. Griselda dedicates herself to becoming the perfect marchioness and achieves this task. (Griselda Grantly might possibly be the nineteenth-century version of Tiffany Blum-Deckler from Daria. 'Do you think I'd look good as a marchioness?') The lively girl with the individual personality is more delightful, but both are interesting literary characters.
Luckily there is a little more Mrs Proudie in this book - asserting herself as always. (Speaking of Proudie, I'm thrilled to realise that Geraldine McEwan once played her! And Alan Rickman for Slope.) There's a passage in this novel in which Trollope sums up the general themes of THE WARDEN and subtext in his other clerical novels:
Our present arrangement of parochial incomes is beloved as being time-honoured, gentlemanlike, English, and picturesque. We would fain adhere to it closely as long as we can, but we know that we do so by the force of our prejudices, and not by that of our judgment.
Trollope's mindset seems to be conservative, preferring the tradition and noting the beauty in it; but he is also intelligent, and able to see the merits of making reformations. His only plea is that reformation processes should ideally be slow, lest the quick change turn out to hold negative consequences. Which proscript is viewed with varying degrees of sympathy depending on the cause, the reasons for the change, and the consequences of a slow or fast alteration. Robarts is another example of a clergyman's interaction with the money that a clergyman can earn, and the ambiguous answers to the questions: how much of a living, and how much of an ambition, should a man who makes his lifelong labour the church be able to claim?
Miss Dunstable, the heiress to the Oil of Lebanon riches, makes a reappearance in this volume, which is gravy - her spirit was an excellent sidelight to DOCTOR THORNE. She's another female character who's too much for Trollope to confine into a stereotypically feminine role: forthright, vigorous, honest, good-natured, clever, and too good at managing her own affairs to make most men around her entirely comfortable. This book includes some serious character development for Miss Dunstable: she has both cleverness and a warm heart, but her money's carried her into the worlds where only her cleverness is appreciated, and so she's becoming colder. Dunstable's flaw is akin to Mr Bennet's - too strong a love of ridiculing the world's humbugs in conjunction with too little a love of anything else. Character development ensues and she gets a love interest, which is great fun. Their correspondence is a must-read. (Said love interest is perfect for her. It's awesome.)
This time Dunstable replaces Roger Scatcherd as the benevolent Uncle Pennybags coming in to bestow money on the deserving or at least prominent in the narrative - although Dunstable isn't just doing it out of the goodness of her heart. She's able to craft a win-win deal for herself and all others concerned! Trollope's softheartedness toward his characters--even Sowerby--is a relief, and the strength of the writing reminds readers that real people in similar circumstances are rarely so lucky.
As a sequel to DOCTOR THORNE, this book updates us on Frank and Mary Gresham's happy married life - so utterly content together that literature about them has extremely little interest.
This book is a good one - plenty of emotional turmoil, character development, an interesting young heroine, and extremely interesting old favourite characters. The plot and pacing are much better handled than DOCTOR THORNE. If this doesn't quite reach BARCHESTER TOWERS' heights, it's jolly good in its own right.
This sort of plot hits my id-fic financial-insecurity buttons hard. I'm not sure exactly why I have those buttons, but Victorian novels about people teetering on the edges of financial ruin - even when 'ruin' to them still means 'so poor they only have one servant and are by definition better off than the servant' - motivate me to some serious nail-biting frenzies.
This is a good passage about the psychology of entitlement: Mark Robarts has prospered mostly because of his hardworking father and his friendship with Lord Lufton and Lord Lufton's mother, Lady Lufton.
He had obtained a living at an age when other young clergymen are beginning to think of a curacy, and he had obtained such a living as middle-aged parsons in their dreams regard as a possible Paradise for their old years. Of course he felt that he was different from other parsons.
Now Mark Robarts is intent on mixing with high society - perhaps it'll eventually get him a bishopric. But in the course of his mixing, he's persuaded to sign a bill for four hundred pounds that he doesn't have, by the entirely unscrupulous Sowerby. Robarts' complacency and weakness makes the reader feel he deserves a lesson, but the narrative raises a lot of human sympathy for him.
There's another excellent passage about Robarts' mindset here, regarding human tendency to apply the sunk costs fallacy even when we really shouldn't. For people like Robarts it's not easy to turn back after a path has been started.
But at last he did sign the bill, and sent it off, as Sowerby had directed. What else was he to do?
Fool that he was. A man always can do right, even though he has done wrong before. But that previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.
Trollope has strong words to say about the grinding effects of poverty, which ring more true than Charles Dickens' perfect saints in ragged clothing. Trollope's own life contains brushes with financial insecurity - his mother, Frances Trollope, had to support the family by writing novels, and Trollope himself had a bad experience with debt in his early years in the public service. (It's possible that insubordinate, unpunctual, impecunious clerk Crocker in MARION FAY is a particularly unflattering self-portrait!) Crawley is a bitter man, and Mrs Crawley is a good but human woman; in their years of living on the poor salary of a perpetual curate they find themselves abandoning prior scruples and old refinements. Crawley gives in to bitterness and deprives his family, while his wife lies and cheats to accept charity he doesn't know about. Sometimes fine feelings are a luxury as much as anything else.
FRAMLEY PARSONAGE can be read for a classist moral: do not mix too much with those above your station in life. But Trollope has terrible bluebloods and decent tailors in his corpus of works. Humankind eternally struggles with the question, to always reach for a higher goal but never reach too much. Or, alternatively, the novel can be read to say that Robarts' higher goal is not so high: intercourse with not-terribly-scrupulous worldly society. The narrative expresses this moral as the proverb about touching pitch leaving a stain on your clothes. Robarts is also employed in something of a sinecure, where he gets an excellent income for relatively light pastoral duties - and makes choices that further lighten his load. Robarts hasn't got enough to do in his real job and gets into trouble as a result, which is a pronouncement we'd still find reasonable today.
Lucy Robarts stands out as the heroine: a young lady who's attractive because of her interesting personality more than her beauty. Lucy is reclusive by nature, which makes her a fascinating mystery to other characters: intelligent, independent, and not in the least in need of others' valuation to prove herself. She also has the tendency to make facetious jokes about the things that are most painful to her, which endears her to the reader. Griselda Grantly, daughter of Archdeacon and Mrs Grantly, forms the foil to Lucy, and in the narrative she is interestingly shallow and inhuman - a young lady so beautiful that she seems to be made of marble, and correspondingly like marble she's cold, stiff, and extremely opaque. In contrast to Lucy, the narrative doesn't dare to explore what goes on inside Griselda, if anything in fact does. Griselda dedicates herself to becoming the perfect marchioness and achieves this task. (Griselda Grantly might possibly be the nineteenth-century version of Tiffany Blum-Deckler from Daria. 'Do you think I'd look good as a marchioness?') The lively girl with the individual personality is more delightful, but both are interesting literary characters.
Luckily there is a little more Mrs Proudie in this book - asserting herself as always. (Speaking of Proudie, I'm thrilled to realise that Geraldine McEwan once played her! And Alan Rickman for Slope.) There's a passage in this novel in which Trollope sums up the general themes of THE WARDEN and subtext in his other clerical novels:
Our present arrangement of parochial incomes is beloved as being time-honoured, gentlemanlike, English, and picturesque. We would fain adhere to it closely as long as we can, but we know that we do so by the force of our prejudices, and not by that of our judgment.
Trollope's mindset seems to be conservative, preferring the tradition and noting the beauty in it; but he is also intelligent, and able to see the merits of making reformations. His only plea is that reformation processes should ideally be slow, lest the quick change turn out to hold negative consequences. Which proscript is viewed with varying degrees of sympathy depending on the cause, the reasons for the change, and the consequences of a slow or fast alteration. Robarts is another example of a clergyman's interaction with the money that a clergyman can earn, and the ambiguous answers to the questions: how much of a living, and how much of an ambition, should a man who makes his lifelong labour the church be able to claim?
Miss Dunstable, the heiress to the Oil of Lebanon riches, makes a reappearance in this volume, which is gravy - her spirit was an excellent sidelight to DOCTOR THORNE. She's another female character who's too much for Trollope to confine into a stereotypically feminine role: forthright, vigorous, honest, good-natured, clever, and too good at managing her own affairs to make most men around her entirely comfortable. This book includes some serious character development for Miss Dunstable: she has both cleverness and a warm heart, but her money's carried her into the worlds where only her cleverness is appreciated, and so she's becoming colder. Dunstable's flaw is akin to Mr Bennet's - too strong a love of ridiculing the world's humbugs in conjunction with too little a love of anything else. Character development ensues and she gets a love interest, which is great fun. Their correspondence is a must-read. (Said love interest is perfect for her. It's awesome.)
This time Dunstable replaces Roger Scatcherd as the benevolent Uncle Pennybags coming in to bestow money on the deserving or at least prominent in the narrative - although Dunstable isn't just doing it out of the goodness of her heart. She's able to craft a win-win deal for herself and all others concerned! Trollope's softheartedness toward his characters--even Sowerby--is a relief, and the strength of the writing reminds readers that real people in similar circumstances are rarely so lucky.
As a sequel to DOCTOR THORNE, this book updates us on Frank and Mary Gresham's happy married life - so utterly content together that literature about them has extremely little interest.
This book is a good one - plenty of emotional turmoil, character development, an interesting young heroine, and extremely interesting old favourite characters. The plot and pacing are much better handled than DOCTOR THORNE. If this doesn't quite reach BARCHESTER TOWERS' heights, it's jolly good in its own right.
