Source of book: I own this.
Regular readers of my blog know that my favorite Victorian
author is Anthony Trollope. I try to read one of his books every year. Past
reads since I started writing about them are:
Barsetshire Chronicles:
The
Barchester Chronicles (BBC miniseries based on the first two books, The Warden and Barchester Towers)
Other books:
These are not, of course, the only Trollope novels I have
read. These are the ones I have read since I started blogging in 2010. I should
mention Castle Richmond and The Bertrams as particularly excellent
books.
***
Orley Farm is one
of Trollope’s stand-alone novels, and the last of the set of Dover paperbacks I was given in my teens by
the husband of my violin
teacher. Along with some Wodehouse and a few hardback Dickens, he gave me
five Trollopes - I had never heard of him, but fell in love.
While Orley Farm
had its moments, it was not my favorite of Trollope’s books. In large part,
this stems from two factors. First, while Trollope is usually fairly gentle
with his characters, writing few true villains, and making everyone human; in
this case, he seemed more to dislike his characters than like them. For the most
part, they are rather unlikeable, and it is difficult to really be in sympathy
with them, the way one is in most of Trollope’s novels. It isn’t the presence
of unpleasant characters so much as it is the lack of humanizing traits which
are the problem. I found it uncharacteristically difficult to understand the
motivations, and thus found many of the characters to be caricatures rather
than the truly three dimensional inhabitants of the typical Trollopean world.
The second factor is somewhat related to the first. I feel
that Trollope wrote this book more to complain about lawyers and the British
legal system than to explore the psychology of his characters. Whatever
Trollope is as an author, he isn’t Charles Dickens, and he isn’t particularly
adept at the use of caricature in satire. Rather, Trollope’s strength as a
satirical and social writer is his ability to humanize the victims of injustice
- and especially injustice inflicted with good, reforming motivations. Thus, we
can sympathize with Mr. Harding even as we may agree that he is the recipient
of a sinecure that probably should be reformed. We can feel for Carrie Brattle,
whose status as a “fallen woman” gives her no real chance at a decent life. We
can even understand the loathsome Mrs. Proudie and her attempts to further her
religious beliefs, even as we hate her methods - and even perhaps the substance
of those beliefs. She is all the more real for being humanly understandable.
This was my biggest problem with Orley Farm. I had a hard time finding a character who was really
fleshed out, particularly for the first half of the book.
A bit of background might help here. Trollope was the son of
a failed barrister. His father never really made a good go of it in law, and
was forever in debt. His
mother, however, was a skilled writer. Her books aren’t much read today,
and she wasn’t a world class author, but she was financially successful, and
her books were indeed influential. Domestic
Manners of the Americans was her most successful, and many of her
observations about American arrogance and hypocrisy still ring true. She also
wrote an anti-slavery novel which inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe, and an
“industrial novel,” about class injustice in the age of the Industrial
Revolution - another book which inspired more famous later authors. So, with
her husband failing to make a living, it fell to Frances Trollope to support
the family with writing.
Young Anthony eschewed the law, and went to work for the
Postal Service, where he invented the pillar letter box, and found time to
write. While he never studied law, he absorbed a large amount of knowledge
about it, and his books generally get the legal details right. Although the
British legal system of the Victorian Era is much different from the 21st Century American legal system. (I
could write a whole post about all of the differences…)
What Anthony never seems to have understood about the law
was the idea that the criminal law system is supposed to be biased in favor of
the accused - in large part to counteract the power of the State. In theory
(although not as often in practice), this should result in a very small number
of false convictions - but should, by design,
allow a number of guilty persons to go free. That this isn’t necessarily the
case in practice is beside the point.
Yes, money still tends to get one off, and impoverished people of color tend to
be falsely convinced more often than wealthy whites. But the problem isn’t that we make it too easy for those
horrid criminal defense lawyers to get people off.
But that is precisely
the point Trollope wants to make. He honestly seems to believe that guilty
people shouldn’t be defended, and that neutral witnesses shouldn’t ever have their credibility attacked. As
a lawyer, this is an offensive idea. And in general, Trollope is so much more
subtle than this, which is why I was disappointed.
The plot is basically this. (Spoiler alert!)
My Dover paperback edition has the original J. E. Millais illustrations.
Sir Joseph Mason the elder was a wealthy man, with two major
estates. After his first wife died, leaving a grown son, Sir Joseph remarried a
young woman barely out of her teens - a woman who was beautiful but under
challenging financial circumstances. She marries him out of need and pressure
from her family, not love. They have a child together, and soon thereafter, Sir
Joseph dies.
A last minute codicil to his will leaves Orley Farm - the
lesser estate - to the infant. The previous will would have left everything, except for the small
allowance to the widow required by law, to the older son. The question was, did
young Lady Mason forge the codicil?
The first trial - the probate - takes place after the death,
and is alluded to in the book. The real action occurs twenty-one years later,
when the infant, Lucious, comes of age. He angers the son-in-law of the lawyer
who worked for Sir Joseph. Said son-in-law, himself a lawyer, goes through the
old documents and discovers evidence which may be in favor of a finding of
forgery. He contacts Joseph Jr., the older son, and incites him to seek a prosecution
of Lady Mason for perjury and forgery. That trial is the centerpiece of the
story.
This being Trollope, the book is roughly 650 pages long, and
pretty dense. It also has a number of subplots involving the periphery players.
Lady Mason’s lawyer has domestic troubles because his neglected wife assumes he
is having an affair with Lady Mason. Lady Mason’s neighbor and old friend, Sir
Peregrine Orme, falls in love with her, while his son unsuccessfully pursues
the daughter of a judge - she instead falls in love with an idealistic young
barrister who ends up working on Lady Orme’s case. Even the witnesses have
their own little dramas going. Everyone connected with the case is somehow
involved in the story.
As usual with Trollope, the question isn’t really if Lady
Mason is guilty. Rather, it is how each of the characters response to the
situation. Including her. There is the legal question, of course: will a jury
find her guilty? There is the moral case: what would real justice look like?
And there is the social question: guilty or not, will she and her son lose
their reputations?
So much about this is good. The book had some great moments
in it. If only Trollope had allowed himself to actually understand how a lawyer
could - and should - defend a guilty client. I think he was a bit blinded by
his own upbringing. I wasn’t able to find out much of the circumstances of his
father’s failure, but it is entirely possible that the idealistic Felix Graham
is meant to be a stand-in for the elder Mr. Trollope. He is hopeless at the
task of doing his best even when he doesn’t believe in his case. And he is
advised that maybe he should pursue his writing instead. (Of course, in this
particular world, he also is able to marry a wealthy woman.)
I think another factor here is that Trollope was by nature
and inclination, a conservative. He preferred the High Church
to the Low Church, was suspicious of reforms of all kinds, and staunchly
supported the existing class system, even though he wasn’t a winner in that system.
Thus, I think that he couldn’t - despite really making an effort - see the
moral injustice inherent in giving property to one child while leaving the
other destitute. Hey, Primogeniture has a long and storied history, even if it
was brutal to younger children, and undoubtedly fed the unending wars of the
last, well, millennia. After all, a bunch of younger sons without money, whose
class meant they couldn’t make a living by working, with few prospects...hey,
might as well go to war and try to win an award from the king, right? Trollope
really does try. But he can’t quite
go there. Rules is rules.
I think this is ultimately why I had a hard time feeling the
characters. Lady Mason is a great character, for the most part. But Trollope’s
conservatism can’t allow her to truly stick to her guns. In a later (or
earlier) era, she could have been the hero of the book. Likewise, Lucious is a
real prick, and it is impossible to like him. I suspect Trollope didn’t want
him to be a sympathetic victim - he somehow had to deserve tragedy. Thus, of
the main players in the central drama, the most believable are those I would
call the true villains. Mr. Dockwrath, the lawyer who stirs everything up in
retaliation for losing his lease, ignores the advice of his much wiser wife,
grubs for as much as he can get, and ultimately loses everything. He thoroughly
deserves it. But he is also believable:
I know people like that, and they often end the same way. Likewise, I know
people like Joseph Mason the younger, consumed with a thirst for revenge
because he feels cheated out of what he “deserves,” namely everything. But
again, he is believable. He is still, 25 years later, pissed off at his father
for refusing to “act his age” and remain a widower. Instead, he fell for the charming
young lady (who he blames entirely for his father’s actions), with the result
being an unwanted younger brother who might get some of the inheritance.
Some of the minor characters are really good. I liked Judge
Stavely and his family - of all the people, I would most like to meet them in
person. Faced with the fact that his daughter has fallen in love with a poor,
unattractive, but intelligent man, he supports her, remembering his own
courtship. I also liked the lawyer, Mr. Furnival. He is very imperfect,
clearly, but very human - and a rather conscientious lawyer. I’d want to hire
someone like him: aware of his limitations, devoted to seeing his clients’
cases through, quietly competent, and in no need of self-aggrandizement.
As in any Trollope novel, there is much good writing, and a
number of memorable lines. Here are a few that stood out to me.
From the first chapter, where Trollope introduces the book:
It is not true that a rose by any other
name will smell as sweet. Were it true, I should call this story ‘The Great
Orley Farm Case.’ But who would ask for the ninth number of a serial work
burthened with so very uncouth an appellation? Thence, and therefore, - Orley
Farm.
I say so much at commencing in order
that I may have an opportunity of explaining that this book of mine will not be
devoted in any special way to rural delights. The name might lead to the idea
that new precepts were to be given, in the pleasant guise of a novel, as to
cream-cheeses, pigs with small bones, wheat sown in drills, or artificial
manure. No such aspirations are mine.
Or, Mr. Furnival, giving the common - and true - lament of
us lawyers:
‘We lawyers are very much abused
now-a-days,’ said Mr. Furnival… ‘but I hardly know how the world would get on
without us.’
There is a great scene involving Sir Joseph the younger and
his wife. While he is extravagantly rich, she is a penny-pinching shrew. Their
food is almost inedible, and they really can’t entertain, because she refuses
to have proper and sufficient provender for the spread. Trollope describes
their attempt at a Christmas dinner, and what followed.
And then they all went to church. Mrs.
Mason would not on any account have missed church on Christmas-day or a Sunday.
It was a cheap duty, and therefore rigidly performed.
There is another extended musing which is quite fun. I am
reading a book on the intentional “moulding” of a wife - I wonder if Trollope
was familiar with the facts or not - so this quote seems apropos. It also is
percipient on a few timeless questions: is trying to turn a spouse into what
you wish they were ever a good idea? And what is the real reason creeps like Roy
Moore want to find much younger girls? Anyway, here is the quote, which
comes after we are introduced to Felix Graham, and the “engagement” he is in
with his ward - at the insistence of her father, when she was a mere child. She
was not, in any meaningful sense, consulted.
In speaking of the character and
antecedents of Felix Graham I have said that he was moulding a wife for
himself. The idea of a wife thus moulded to fit a man’s own grooves, and
educated to suit matrimonial purposes according to the exact views of the
future husband was by no means original with him. Other men have moulded their
wives, but I do not know that as a rule the practice has been found to answer.
It is open, in the first place, to this objection, - that the moulder does not
generally conceive such idea very early in life, and the idea when conceived
must necessarily be carried out on a young girl. Such a plan is the result of
much deliberate thought, and has generally arisen from long observation, on the
part of the thinker, of the unhappiness arising from marriages in which there
has been no moulding. Such a frame of mind comes upon a bachelor, perhaps about
his thirty-fifth year, and then he goes to work with a girl of fourteen. The
operation takes some ten years, at the end of which the moulded bride regards
her lord as an old man. On the whole I think that the ordinary plan is the
better, and even the safer. Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the
light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your
little questions about horseflesh and music - about affairs masculine and
feminine - then take the leap in the dark. There is danger, no doubt; but the
moulded wife is, I think, more dangerous.
Don’t get hung up on the Victorian nonsense - Trollope was a
product of his time. Just enjoy the gentle snark.
My final quote is about Judge Stavely, after he has essentially
opened the door to the possibility of Felix Graham marrying his daughter
Madeleine.
But the judge was an odd man in many of
the theories of his life. One of them, with reference to his children, was very
odd, and altogether opposed to the usual practice of the world. It was this, -
that they should be allowed, as far as was practicable, to do what they liked.
Now the general opinion of the world is certainly quite the reverse - namely
this, that children, as long as they are under the control of their parents,
should be hindered and prevented in those things to which they are most inclined.
Of course the world in general, in carrying out this practice, excuses it by an
assertion, - made to themselves or others - that children customarily like
those things which they ought not to like. But the judge had an idea quite
opposed to this. Children, he said, if properly trained, would like those
things which were good for them. Now it may be that he thought his daughter had
been properly trained.
I am somewhat of this mindset. Coming from a religious
tradition which is fundamentally authoritarian - and increasingly so - I have
had my own bit of pressure (as an adult, by the way) to order my life, not
according to what I want and believe is best for my family, but according to
the preferences of others. Or, to be more accurate, I
have been pressured to pressure my wife
to conform to the expectations of others. Because in a patriarchal
religious tradition, women face most of the expectations. I think Judge
Staveley was ahead of his time in this idea that children are, when it comes to
decisions about their future, entitled to choose their own lives.
I don’t want this review to sound too negative. While this
isn’t my favorite Trollope book, it still is good, just flawed. If you haven’t
discovered Trollope, I wouldn’t recommend this as a first book, because it
lacks the best traits of his writing: psychological subtlety, sympathetic
characters, and a wry distrust of convention even as he defends it. I’d go with
the Barchester Chronicles, or perhaps
with The Bertrams or Castle Richmond as starters.
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