THE PRIME MINISTER Read online

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  CLASSICS

  THE PRIME MINISTER

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE was born in London in 1815 and died in 1882. His father was a barrister who went bankrupt and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. His education was disjointed and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

  Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime, publishing over forty novels and many short stories, at the same time following a notable career as a senior civil servant in the Post Office. The Warden (1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was succeeded by the sequence of ‘Barsetshire’ novels Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This series, regarded by some as Trollope’s masterpiece, demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels – property – and features a gallery of recurring characters, including, among others, Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. Almost equally popular were the six Palliser novels comprising Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880). Among his other novels are He Knew He Was Right (1869) and The Way We Live Now (1875), each regarded by some as among the greatest of nineteenth-century fiction.

  DAVID SKILTON was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and Copenhagen University, and until 1992 was Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is Literary Adviser to the Trollope Society and General Editor of the Trollope Society/Folio Society edition of Trollope’s novels. His books include Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972, 1996), Defoe to the Victorians (1985), The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (1993), and numerous editions of Victorian works, including Trollope’s An Autobiography (1996) in Penguin Classics.

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE

  The Prime Minister

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  DAVID SKILTON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published 1875–6

  Published in Penguin Classics 1994

  Reprinted with a new Chronology and updated Further Reading 2004

  12

  Introduction and notes copyright © David Skilton, 1994

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  Further Reading

  THE PRIME MINISTER

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The editor’s thanks are due to the New York Public Library for access to the manuscript of The Prime Minister, which is in the Arents Collection; to Robin Moffet, to Claire Connolly, to Christopher Skelton-Foord, to the Secretary of the MFH Association, and to the staffs of the London Library and the University Library, Cardiff

  CHRONOLOGY

  1815 Battle of Waterloo

  Lord George Gordon Byron, Hebrew Melodies

  Anthony Trollope born 24 April at 16 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, the fourth sea of Thomas and Frances Trollope. Family moves shortly after to Harrow-on-the-Hill

  1823 Attends Harrow as a day-boy (–1825)

  1825 First public steam railway opened

  Sir Walter Scott, The Betrothed and The Talisman

  Sent as a boarder to a private school in Sunbury, Middlesex

  1827 Greek War of Independence won in the battle of Navarino

  Sent to school at Winchester College. His mother sets sail for the USA on 4 November with three of her children

  1830 George IV dies; his brother ascends the throne as William IV

  William Cobbett, Rural Rides

  Removed from Winchester. Sent again to Harrow until 1834

  1832 Controversial First Reform Act extends the right to vote to approximately one man in five

  Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

  1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Poor Law Act introduces workhouses to England

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii

  Trollope family migrates to Bruges to escape creditors. Anthony returns to London to take up a junior clerkship in the General Post Office

  1835 Halley’s Comet appears. ‘Railway mania’ in Britain

  Robert Browning, Paracelsus

  His father dies in Bruges

  1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Penny Post introduced

  Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (–1841)

  Dangerously ill in May and June

  1841 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  Appointed Postal Surveyor’s Clerk for Central District of Ireland. Moves to Banagher, King’s County (now Co. Offaly)

  1843 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. I)

  Begins to write his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran

  1844 Daniel O’Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, imprisoned for conspiracy; later released

  William Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon

  Marries Rose Heseltine in June. Transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary

  1846 Famine rages in Ireland. Repeal of the Corn Laws

  Dickens, Dombey and Son (–1848)

  First son, Henry Merivale, born in March

  1847 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

  A second son, Frederic James Anthony, born in September

  The Macdermots of Ballycloran

  1848 Revolution in France; re-establishment of the Republic. The ‘Cabbage Patch Rebellion’ in Tipperary fails

  Trollopes move to Mallow, Co. Cork

  The Kellys and the O’Kellys

  1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

  La Vendée. Writes The Noble Filt, a play and the source of his later novel Can You Forgive Her?

  1851 The Great Exhibition

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Sent to survey and reorganize postal system in southwest England and Wales (–1852)

  1852 First pillar box in the British Isles introduced in St Helier, Jersey, on Trollope’s recommendation

  1853 Thackeray, The Newcomes (–1855)

  Moves
to Belfast to take post as Acting Surveyor for the Post Office

  1854 Britain becomes involved in the Crimean War (–1856)

  Appointed Surveyor of the Northern District of Ireland

  1855 David Livingstone discovers Victoria Falls, Zambia (Zimbabwe) Dickens, Little Dorrit (–1857)

  Moves to Donnybrook, Co. Dublin

  The Warden. Writes The New Zealander (published 1972)

  1857 Indian Mutiny (–1858)

  Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays

  Barchester Towers

  1858 Irish Republican Brotherhood founded in Dublin

  George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

  Travels to Egypt, England and the West Indies on postal business

  Doctor Thorne

  1859 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

  Leaves Ireland to settle in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, after being appointed Surveyor of the Eastern District of England

  The Bertrams and The West Indies and the Spanish Main

  1860 Dickens, Great Expectations (–1861)

  Framley Parsonage (–1861, his first serialized fiction) and Castle Richmond

  1861 American Civil War (–1865)

  John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. Mrs Beeton, Book of Household Management

  Travels to USA to research a travel book

  Orley Farm (–1862)

  1862 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Last Poems

  Elected to the Garrick Club

  The Small House at Allington (–1864) and North America

  1863 His mother dies in Florence

  Rachel Ray

  1864 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (–1866)

  Elected to the Athenaeum Club

  Can You Forgive Her? (–1865)

  1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Fortnightly Review founded by Trollope (among others)

  Miss Mackenzie, The Belton Estate (–1866)

  1866 Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical

  The Coverings (–1867), Nina Balatka (–1867) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (–1867)

  1867 Second Reform Act extends, the franchise further, enlarging the electorate to almost two million

  Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Song of Italy

  Resigns from the GPO and assumes editorship of St Paul’s Magazine

  Phineas Finn (–1869)

  1868 Last public execution in London

  Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

  Visits the USA on a postal mission; returns to England to stand unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Beverley, Yorkshire

  He Knew He Was Right (–1869)

  1869 Suez Canal opened

  Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Lorna Doone

  The Vicar of Bullhampton (–1870)

  1870 Married Women’s Property Act passed

  Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  Resigns editorship of St Paul’s Magazine

  Ralph the Heir (–1871), Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, and a translation of The Commentaries of Caesar

  1871 Eliot, Middlemarch (–1872)

  Gives up house at Waltham Cross and sails to Australia with Rose to visit his son Frederic

  The Eustace Diamonds (–1873)

  1872 Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes (–1873)

  Travels in Australia and New Zealand and returns to England via the USA

  The Golden Lion of Granpere

  1873 Mill, Autobiography

  Settles in Montagu Square, London

  Lady Anna (–1874), Phineas Redux (–1874); Australia and New Zealand and Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life

  1874 The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris

  Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

  The Way We Live Now (–1875)

  1875 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

  Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon

  Begins writing An Autobiography on his return. The Prime Minister (–1876)

  1876 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

  Finishes writing An Autobiography. The American Senator (–1877)

  1877 Henry James, The American

  Visits South Africa

  Is He Popenjoy? (–1878)

  1878 Hardy, The Return of the Native

  Sails to Iceland

  John Caldigate (–1879), The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye (–1879) and South Africa

  1879 George Meredith, The Egoist

  Cousin Henry, The Duke’s Children (–1880) and Thackeray

  1880 Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)

  Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion

  Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex

  Dr Worth’s School and The Life of Cicero

  1881 In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (–1882)

  Ayala’s Angel, The Fixed Period (–1882) and Marion Fay (–1882)

  1882 Phoenix Park murders in Dublin

  Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December

  Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough’s Family (–1883) and The Landleaguers (–1883, unfinished)

  1883 An Autobiography is published under the supervision of Trollope’s son Henry

  1884 An Old Man’s Love

  1923 The Noble Filt

  1927 London Tradesmen (reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1880)

  1972 The New Zealander

  INTRODUCTION

  The Prime Minister, which came out in parts from November 1875 to June 1876, was Trollope’s thirty-third novel, and the fifth in the series of six known as the Palliser novels, which began in 1864—5 with Can You Forgive Her?, and was to conclude in 1879–80 with The Duke’s Children. Although Parliament is the focus of the lives of many of the characters in these books, Trollope does not attempt the sort of treatment of political doctrine which Disraeli made his own. Instead the series presents the workings of a social world which centres on politicians and politics, including domestic and sexual politics, but in the process says more about politics as a way of life than as ideological commitment. Running through these six novels is an account of the marriage of an ill-matched pair, presented with a wealth of interconnecting detail spanning the years during which Trollope, in his own words, was ‘manufacturing within my own mind the characters of the man and his wife’.1 The vivacious and exceptionally wealthy Lady Glencora McCluskie was married off young to Plantagenet Palliser, the heir to a great dukedom, whose only promise was that he would be a worthy servant of his country, and whose greatest enthusiasm was working out the fine details of a plan to decimalize the currency. We are reminded that for a while he left politics and took a conscientious interest in conjugal sex, getting quite to like it in fact, or at least recognizing the advantages of paternity. Marie Flynn, with a fine sense of the equivocal balance between social success and personal fulfilment in a woman’s marriage, commends the work of the young Glencora’s guardians in catching the future Duke, with an ironic ‘How well they did for you!’. Throughout the series, with the wife providing the verve and the husband the brake on it, the Palliser marriage is a major connecting thread in one of the greatest extended fictions in the English language.

  This series of novels is at once a large-scale presentation of mid-Victorian life and a deeply personal work:

  By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters with their belongings have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently I have used them for the expression of my political and social convictions.2

  Though never selling as well as Trollope’s earlier and immensely popular Chronicles of Barsetshire, the Palliser novels have been very successful with critics and a more limited readership ever since. The subject-matter
was clearly more specialized. As Trollope remarks of Phineas Firm,

  It was not a brilliant success, – because men and women not conversant with political matters could not care much for a hero who spent so much of his time either in the House of Commons or in a public office. But the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish read it also. As this was what I had intended, I was contented.3

  As these quotations from An Autobiography indicate, the Palliser series provided the author with an outlet ‘for the expression of my political and social convictions’.4 This release was particularly valuable after 1868, when Trollope had unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in Yorkshire, and had seen his lifelong ambition to sit in the House of Commons frustrated. Years before, when he had been no more than an ordinary Post Office clerk, an uncle of his had mocked his presumption in aspiring to this distinction, and the hurt inflicted by that sarcasm still lingered many years later. So it was appropriate that after his defeat at Beverley he should deliberately stress the political side of his fictional subject-matter: ‘As I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons,’ he explains, ‘I took this method of declaring myself.’s5

  The Prime Minister is the key work in the Palliser series. Not only does Plantagenet Palliser rise to the highest office in the land, but in the course of the novel he articulates some of the author’s own political views, as ‘an advanced, but still a conservative Liberal’, and as we find them also expressed in An Autobiography.6 Trollope tells us that he had particularly exacting ambitions in relation to the character of Palliser, which he intended as a study of how far the realities of political life are compatible with a high sense of personal integrity. In his Autobiography, he describes the run-of-the-mill politicians whom he had hitherto foregrounded:

  [T]he Brocks, De Terriers, Monks, Greshams, and Daubeneys – had been more or less portraits, not of living men, but of living political characters. The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the Government or of the Opposition, had been very easy to describe… [A]s a rule, the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools… and can generally bear to be changed from this box into the other, without, at any rate, the appearance of much personal suffering. Four-and-twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole, and work for one purpose, having each of them to set aside his own idiosyncrasy, and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve their country or their own ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply, – as to whom I never cease to wonder that stones of such strong calibre should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles.