[Readers who are unfamiliar with the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.]
Orley Farm (1861–2) — which George Orwell in 1944 described as ‘one of the most brilliant descriptions of a lawsuit in English fiction’1 — was written shortly after Anthony and Rose Trollope had taken up residence at Waltham House, Waltham Cross. And that seemingly only local fact is of much wider importance than it sounds.
The house no longer exists — there is a pub on the site. But a photograph survives and we know it was a substantial property, a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century brick structure with grounds large enough for animals and orchards.2 We know its public rooms must have been considerable — with space for guests to play exactly the same Christmas games that Trollope describes at Noningsby in Chapter 22 of Orley Farm.3 The House, which Trollope first rented then bought, was important for itself and its comforts. But it was also important for what of Trollope’s good fortune it signified. Waltham House was a sign of the new security of the novelist’s professional and literary success (as 39 Montagu Square, to which he moved in 1873, was even more).4 And success was not a word that could have been associated with, or expected from, Trollope’s earlier life. Given his poor, even wretched start — a childhood and early career dominated by his father’s hopelessness with money, the brutality of Harrow School, his own debts and misery, clumsiness and ineptitude — Trollope now, sitting in Waltham House, had recently returned from Ireland to take up a new and consequential job as Post Office Surveyor for the Eastern District of England. And he had, too, securely obtained for himself a position as a respected English novelist, widely known both to readers and to other major writers and public figures. Orley Farm is a long and confident story written by an author who has, and knows he has, become a notable man of letters as well as a professional success.
‘I now felt’, Trollope said about the early 1860s in his posthumously published An Autobiography (1883),
that I had gained my object. In 1862 I had achieved that which I contemplated when I went to London in 1834, and towards which I made my first attempt when I began the Macdermots [of Ballycloran] in 1843. I had created for myself a position among literary men, and had secured to myself an income on which I might live in ease and comfort, — which ease and comfort have been made to include many luxuries. From this time for a period of twelve years my income averaged £4500 a year. Of this I spent about two-thirds, and put by one. I ought perhaps to have done better, — to have spent one-third, and put by two; but I have ever been too well inclined to spend freely that which has come easily.5
Here was Trollope’s typical candour about his financial resources, which some readers have found hard to take, preferring novelists that are either poor or at least silent about their prosperity. Trollope’s indication that large sums of money from advances for novels came ‘easily’ is, likewise, an assertion not entirely comfortable to read. It is not hard to think that writing should be work, even tough work — as Thomas Carlyle thought it was — and that facility is only a sign of superficiality. But Trollope’s ease was not. Fluency was no symptom of lightness — as John Ruskin’s ease in writing was not either — but of intellectual control and well-organized preparation. Trollope was no artist in the Romantic genius model (assuming for a moment that anyone actually is). His imagination worked most rewardingly with good planning as well as labour. And looking around him as he began Orley Farm, Trollope could congratulate himself that it was nothing less than his life-plan that was working out.
Yet the possession at Waltham Cross meant even more than this. And Waltham House matters to Orley Farm because property was no innocent topic for Trollope’s whole upbringing, and the troubles of its ownership are peculiarly refracted and reflected in this absorbing novel’s main plot. Trollope’s father, Thomas Anthony Trollope (1774–1835), had grown up expecting to inherit Julians, a country house and reasonably large estate near Royston in Hertfordshire that belonged to his uncle, Adolphus Meetkerke, who had no children.6 As Anthony’s elder brother, Thomas (‘Tom’) Adolphus Trollope (1810–92), recalled in his autobiography, What I Remember (1887–9), the unexpected death of Meetkerke’s wife and his surprising second marriage to a younger woman, Matilda Jane Wilkinson, changed that. Tom’s middle name had anticipated his expected legacy. But it did not materialize. Uncle Meetkerke, Tom remembered, ‘was as fine an old man physically as anybody could wish to see’. And before long, he became ‘the father of six children!’7 Thomas Anthony’s expected inheritance of Julians was lost with the new claimants.8
Trollope’s father — whose practice as a barrister was failing, and potential friends were being alienated by his confrontational manner — felt the loss of his inheritance, the novelist said, as ‘a final crushing blow’.9 Orley Farm reimagines that family story in a novel intimate with a disaster that is transformed for the reader into a moral challenge of sympathies. Orley Farm conceives the loss of an inheritance not only as a misfortune but a crime. What had been a ‘blow’ to the Trollope family becomes here, in the alchemy of Trollope’s imagination, the result of forgery, followed by perjury. (It becomes too the unthinkable difficulty of a guilty secret borne for twenty years.) Somewhere in his mind, it seems, Trollope in Orley Farm could not entirely relieve himself, however unreasonably, of the idea that Meetkerke’s new will had been some kind of wrong.
And family narrative, if it gives the starting point, also provides the literal setting for this multilayered novel. Orley Farm, the place, is an imaginative version of one of the Trollopes’ actual family homes. Trollope’s father, living with his wife and children, had initially hired a house on Lord Northwick’s land, Northwick Park, called Ilotts Farm. While there, however, Mr Trollope had, with Lord Northwick’s permission, built a new house, completed in 1818. Mr Trollope named this place Julians (though this is probably not the act of revenge it might appear but a result of the strange coincidence of a nearby field being locally known by that name). Mr Trollope’s rapidly worsening financial problems, nevertheless, meant that he had to sub-let Julians in 1819 and move back to Ilotts Farm, on the southern slope of Harrow Hill. Ilotts Farm was renamed Julian Hill.10 It is this property that is the model for Orley Farm. And as such, Ilotts is the model for the celebrated (if odd) illustration by John Everett Millais that began the published version of Trollope’s novel (see the frontispiece to this edition).11 Orley Farm tells the story of a property that did not legitimately belong to its owners just as the real Orley Farm never belonged to the Trollopes and was, anyway, a substitute for an estate that went legitimately to someone else. It, the real Orley Farm, was even a substitute for another rented house, the second Julians, which the family would have preferred. Orley Farm, the novel, reimagines all of this and, so doing, enables Trollope to distance himself from a troubled and complicated past that was now, amid the comforts of Waltham House, behind him.
But if the Julians story gave a plot to the novel, Orley Farm is also noticeable for not retelling Trollope’s history. The man who misses out on the legacy in Orley Farm is certainly no picture of Trollope’s father. The person who is disinherited is Joseph Mason of Groby Park,12 an unappealing Yorkshire landowner whose interests are partly represented by the even more unappealing, mean, and vindictive attorney, Mr Samuel Dockwrath. And where Orley Farm offers us little encouragement to sympathize with those who have been hard-done-to, the novel also makes the crime that leads to disinheritance the strangely understandable and even awkwardly admirable result of Lady Mason’s love for her son, Lucius. Trollope’s real uncle had protected the life interests of his first-born: the fictional Lady Mason’s much older husband had not (first-born to Lady Mason, that is, not to her husband). And so — making, like Trollope’s later Mr Scarborough’s Family (1882–3), a distinction between what is right and what is legal — Lady Mason is obliged to rectify the damage in a strange kind of Faustian pact with natural justice.13 In turn, the reader of Orley Farm is asked, if not entirely, to sympathize with a criminal rather than with those who suffer from the crime. It is a characteristically complex Trollopian situation. The failure of an inheritance to reach the right person is, in this novel, almost a good. Orley Farm, in other words, recalls Trollope’s life and the loss of Julians, and then, with a sigh of imaginative relief — sets it at a distance.
The confidence that Trollope felt when writing Orley Farm is most obviously visible in literary terms by the fact that this is a peculiarly competitive text. Feeling, as he said in An Autobiography, that he had now ‘created for myself a position among literary men’, Trollope implicitly — almost explicitly — asks us to compare himself with the man who held at the beginning of the 1860s the highest position of all as an English novelist: Charles Dickens (1812–70). In The Warden (1855), the first of the Barchester novels, Trollope had criticized the author of Bleak House (1852–3) — archly named as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ — for his reforming zeal. Nowadays, Trollope’s narrator observes in Chapter 15 of The Warden, ‘ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so’.14 Dickens, the champion of the working man and the airer of his grievances, is firmly in Trollope’s sights in 1855: it is ‘incredible the number of evil practices he has put down’, The Warden tells us: ‘it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects’.15 Yet Orley Farm takes a different view. Deep in Dickens’s territory despite The Warden, it is full of reforming fervour.
As a book in part about the necessity (as Trollope understands it) of improving the modern judiciary, Orley Farm is as querulous over the moral problems with, in particular, a barrister’s role in advocacy as Dickens was with the glacial slowness of Chancery in Bleak House (1852–3). Set in part in the chambers of the Inns of Court, Orley Farm also recalls Dickens in other ways. He is remembered, for instance, in Orley Farm’s taut court-room scenes, which reveal an identical fascination with the spectacle, and the aural drama, of the trials in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). There are the Christmas chapters, too, as Trollope writes at length about seasonal festivities that had become a trade-mark of Dickens’s family fiction. Mr Moulder’s enthusiasm for the wonders of his Christmas turkey in Chapter 24 is, more specifically, a deft parallel to Bob Cratchit’s memorable enthusiasm for his goose in Stave 3 of A Christmas Carol (1843).16
Kantwise and Moulder generally — particularly when they are in the Commercial Room of The Bull in Leeds — are noticeably Dickensian figures, with catchphrases and comically repetitive actions and preoccupations. The amusing lunch party in Chapter 8, with the devastatingly mean-spirited Mrs Mason, might seem a throw-back to Trollope’s manner in The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848). But it is also an adroit piece of Dickensian ventriloquizing. Even in more local instances, Trollope calls to mind the novelist who was possessed, by 1861, of an apparently unsurpassable level of popular appeal. So, for example, when John Kenneby meets his old flame Miriam Dockwrath in Chapter 42 of Orley Farm and finds himself half-repelled by the woman he once hoped to make his wife, attentive readers will recall Chapter 13 of Little Dorrit (1855–7) when Arthur Clenham experiences the same kind of disappointment in being reacquainted with Flora Finching (it was a version of Dickens’s own meeting with Maria Beadnell again in 1855).
There are two reasons for this shadow-boxing, for reading Orley Farm as a novel with more than an eye on the author of Bleak House. The first is that Orley Farm’s Dickensianism is, like Waltham House, an outward sign of Trollope’s confidence. He is reminding his reader of another novelist — Orley Farm is a text that Andrew Wright brilliantly describes as ‘a kind of Great Expectations in reverse’17 — not because he is claiming he can write, or wants to write, like Dickens, but because, with poise and self-assurance, Trollope intends the reader to remember the two men side by side, a realist beside a novelist of multiple modes and inventions. The second reason is that Orley Farm is not only a novel with its eye on how much Dickens was admired but also, more cryptically, on how much he ought not to be admired. The criticism was nothing to do with his fiction (other than with the fact that the fiction celebrated the security of domestic life). Trollope was aware that Dickens had left his wife Catherine — Dickens announced this publicly in The Times in 185818 — and he was also perhaps aware that Dickens was allegedly (and in fact actually) having a relationship with a much younger woman (Ellen Ternan). Orley Farm in turn obliquely repudiates Dickens’s faithlessness in the sorrows of the Furnival plot.19 This story — where the unlovely Kitty Furnival leaves home because she cannot stand her husband, as she thinks, having an affair with a younger woman (albeit not one who is eighteen) — deals with the unusual topic, for Trollope, of (the appearance of ) marital infidelity. Such potential for infidelity, revealingly, had also been the subject of the short story ‘Mrs General Talboys’ that Trollope published eight months after he began writing Orley Farm.20 The matter was on his mind.21
Dickens’s mode in Bleak House was satirical, shaped by fantasy, threaded with comedy, and dependent on a range of two-dimensional characterizations. Orley Farm’s mode, on the other hand, is, as I have said, broadly realist. Trollope’s interest, as it was across his career, is in character and that requires, for the most part, some form of psychological credibility in representation. Realism as a narrative mode (albeit one that, here, incorporates, as Trollope often does, theatricality and sensationalism, as well as subdued comedy) produces in Orley Farm purposeful and propelled writing. But that mode also created problems for Trollope that concerned nothing less than the question of how to read a realist novel as a literary genre a quarter of a century into the reign of Queen Victoria.
Orley Farm is timely. The novel addressed, or at least registered, a public subject that, in the early 1860s, was of national significance. As my notes to this edition indicate, Trollope’s story is alert, however impressionistically, to debates about legal reform in the Palace of Westminster and the mainstream press. In particular, it is interested, albeit hazily, in a collection of statutes known as the 1861 Criminal Consolidation Acts, legislation that was primarily regularizing and clarifying, and which brought into a more coherent whole existing criminal law, much of which was derived from the so-called Peel’s Acts of 1827–32. The Criminal Consolidation Bills — which aptly for Trollope included proposals to address the penalties for forgery22 — were presented to Parliament in 1860 but they ran out of time: returned for the new session, the Bills were passed into law a year later. Trollope, in other words, was writing Orley Farm at exactly the moment that this prospective legislation was making its interrupted passage through Westminster.
The debates in the press, marking the passage of this legislation, which apart from anything else replaced the death penalty with lesser punishments for various crimes,23 provide the public context in which Trollope’s novel was first read and in which it made its most contemporary sense. In ‘Law Reform’ in The London Review on 2 March 1861, for instance, the writer surveyed some of what he perceived were the problems being tackled by Lord Palmerston’s Liberal administration: ‘our jurisprudence is a sealed book to the English people’, The London Review declared, and ‘our judicial proceedings and legal documents are perplexed and tautological to an extent incredible to those who are acquainted with simpler and shorter forms’.24 The general appetite for criminal law reform just before Orley Farm began to appear was being addressed by a Prime Minister Trollope admired and whose biography he would eventually write.25 Palmerston’s plans had prompted The Saturday Review a month earlier in February 1861 to hope that the changes currently being worked through — which were by no means as ambitious as The London Review desired — were but the prelude to a fully articulated English legal code, along the lines of (but more successful than) the French model.26 The Saturday Review was to be disappointed as well. But this environment of aspiration and discussion means that Orley Farm is a novel that in part belongs to a distinctive moment in nineteenth-century legal history. It was a moment involving significant hopes for reform and consolidation, even if the final achievement did not, as nothing less than the official commentary on the 1861 Acts declared,27 reach as far as was needed to make consistent the operation of the courts.
The novelist with whom Trollope strongly disagreed when criticizing barristers in Orley Farm was, strange to relate, no other than his friend and editor, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63). This is a different kind of disagreement from Trollope’s rivalry with Dickens. Thackeray had eloquently supported exactly what Trollope believed to be mistaken. In Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine (where Trollope had issued Framley Parsonage in 1860–1), the author of Vanity Fair had published an essay on ‘The Morality of Advocacy’ in April 1861.28 This essay, too, reflected the mood of 1860 and national keenness for assessing the principles and nature of English law. Trollope’s blunt point in Orley Farm — and blunt it certainly is — is that barristers are corrupt and that they distort truth by hectoring or humiliating witnesses. There is little subtlety in Trollope’s manner here (he becomes hectoring in disliking hectoring). For him, a barrister should not take on a client or a case where he, the barrister, is required to try to persuade the jury to accept something other than what he knows to be the truth. And that same barrister should not employ devilish techniques in cross-examination. ‘Evidence by means of torture,’ Trollope says provocatively in Chapter 71 of Orley Farm, narrating Mr Furnival’s discrediting of Kenneby’s evidence, ‘ — thumbscrew and suchlike, — we have for many years past abandoned as barbarous, and have acknowledged that it is of its very nature useless in the search after truth. How long will it be before we shall recognize that the other kind of torture is equally opposed both to truth and civilization?’ (p. 583). As my notes indicate, legal writers thought this assertion a particularly preposterous misunderstanding of how the law worked in a novel that was generally ignorant of legal practice. The only thing Orley Farm got right, said one writer mischievously in ‘Mr Trollope and the Lawyers’ in November 1862, was the fact that the waiting rooms for witnesses in law courts really did need improving.29
Trollope, disliking Dickens for reformist ambitions, is in a strange position in Orley Farm. ‘Unfortunately’, remarked The Saturday Review in its otherwise glowing review, ‘there is one drawback to Orley Farm. It is a novel with a purpose.’30 Orley Farm was peculiarly, and, given The Warden, unexpectedly Dickensian in this, purposeful, way too. In his knowledgeable article, Thackeray reminded his readers that assertions of fact made in court needed to be tested by barristers since the jury had to be sure that they were indeed facts. Likewise, Thackeray pointed out that there are moral risks in all professions and advocacy was no worse than any other (and what advocacy served, the law, was essential for a civilized society). And, Thackeray declared, both barristers themselves and judges would never in a modern court permit lines of questioning that were unjustifiable. Had he come across this article, Trollope would have found nothing with which to agree.
Orley Farm is a gripping novel about a lawsuit (as well as a sequence of complicated love relationships) and that, surely, is enough? Does reformist fiction in the early 1860s need to be so accurate about what it aspires to change?
One answer to this question concerns the substantial matter of the history of fictional realism in the nineteenth century (the century that invented it). Orley Farm might not tell us much about the law, despite Robert Polhemus’s peculiar assertion in 1968 that ‘Trollope presents, on the whole in Orley Farm, a fair and illuminating picture of the legal system’.31 But the reception of the novel by those informed about the legal system does tell us something about a nearly lost relationship between Victorian realist fiction and the experience of what Sir Frank Kermode would call the middest, the sense of living amid real things.32 What the novel reveals is that the seriousness with which realist fiction on public topics was read by Trollope’s original readers is of a different kind to ours, looking back to a novel more than 150 years old. Orley Farm received more than favourable reviews. The story disclosed the fact, for The London Review, that Trollope ‘is certainly one of the ablest novelists of the day’;33 for The Critic, Orley Farm’s early stages promised ‘a very capital novel; superior, we may almost say, to any which Mr Trollope has yet written’;34 The Times added on Boxing Day 1862 that Trollope had ‘achieved something higher in Orley Farm than in any of his works’.35 Yet the criticism of the misleading depiction of the law was sustained.
Kieran Dolin, the Australian lawyer and literary critic, regarding this criticism, said in Fiction and the Law (2008) that Orley Farm’s reception and the criticism of its representation of the courts confirmed the historian G. M. Young’s nomination of 1860 as ‘the date of that rift in English intelligence when learning began to fragment into specialism’.36 Dolin’s point is that novel critics by 1860 could no longer distinguish between, here, realist fiction and a bill of reform because intellectual culture was dividing into areas of expertise as a general education fragmented. If there is some truth in this, an alternative perspective strikes me as more compelling. The reception of Orley Farm tells us more clearly that intelligence among readers of reformist novels in the realist mode in the early 1860s had not fragmented into specialism, or at least they did not want it to. Trollope in Orley Farm is a reforming realist novelist, and the critics who found his legal plot falling short of accuracy wanted a novel in 1861 that was both compelling fiction (which they recognized Orley was) and coherent critique (which they recognized it was not). What had let these readers down was not the fact that, in some broad societal shift, intellectual culture was dividing into specialisms but more plainly that Trollope himself had taken on a topic he did not know well enough. Trollope’s readers — the critics of The Saturday Review and The London Review, for instance — hoped for a more general culture around the realist novel of ideas; they aspired, simply put, to less fragmentation of expertise than their author was up to.37
But for Trollope, personal impulses, in fact, were stronger than these public ones, and they impart the real imaginative energy to this magnificent novel of waiting. Trollope’s concerns arise most intimately from emotional rather than logical thinking. Barristers, for instance, come out badly in Orley Farm in part because one of them came out so badly in Trollope’s life. Admitted to the Middle Temple in 1801 and called to the bar in 1804, Trollope’s father made no successful life either out of the law, out of property, or out of anything, except his children. (Note that Mr Furnival’s chambers are in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, exactly where Thomas Anthony Trollope’s had been.) Mr Furnival and all the seemingly misguided lawyers of this text are figures of Trollope’s displaced sorrow over a rough and difficult childhood. And Trollope might, too, have formed further opinions of barristers from his own brief but remarkable experience in the witness box. Trollope in Orley Farm — as in his first published novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) — doubts the (alleged) practices of cross-examination. And his doubts partly arise from a real barrister’s attempts to discredit Trollope’s own testimony in a real court of law.
In July 1849 in the Kerry Summer Assizes, in what is now Co. Offaly, Trollope — working for the Post Office in Ireland — appeared as the principal witness for the prosecution of a young post mistress whom he believed he had caught stealing a sovereign from a sealed envelope. The cross-examination was undertaken by the celebrated Isaac Butt (1813–79), later prominent as a leading figure of Home Rule, and, alas, a man not to be unassociated with financial difficulty himself.38 The testimony, happily for Trollope readers, was more or less transcribed by a journalist for the Kerry Evening Post. It is reproduced as Appendix 2 for this edition (pp. 664–70) and is a real Trollopian drama of cross-examination to be compared with the fictional spectacle of the courts in Orley Farm.
In Kerry, Trollope entered the witness box expecting to be badly treated. His views of barristers were, it seems, already formed and no doubt were only confirmed. It is hard to say that Trollope’s level-headed and confident performance, if the transcript is accurate, was anything other than outstanding. John Kenneby he was not. Where a seed for the Orley Farm plot is in Julians, a seed for its criticism of advocacy is in the dazzling surety of Anthony Trollope in the Kerry Assizes of July 1849.
Realism where the law is concerned took Trollope in Orley Farm into deep water. But what about psychological realism? What about his commitment to the idea, expressed throughout An Autobiography, that the central interest of fiction was character? Over a novel of 1267 leaves in the manuscript — about the same length as Can You Forgive Her? (1864–5) — Trollope presents a diverse array of minds, manners, and feelings: Lucius, the entitled and somewhat arrogant son who endeavours to be a modern land-owner but looks as if he will waste his money — actually it isn’t his money — on experimental farming; Sir Peregrine Orme, a man of great dignity who suffers from his late-in-the-day marriage proposal; Felix Graham, the experimental lawyer who also experiments with the Rousseau-derived idea of educating a perfect wife; Mr Crabwitz, the annoyed and capable clerk to Mr Furnival, responsible for much of Furnival’s success but treated like a messenger boy; Mrs Orme, the perfectly loyal but still judicious friend. And there is also Bridget Bolster, both upper and lower chambermaid, who holds the secret to the whole case but is never asked to disclose it in court. Pressed in cross-examination to confirm that she signed only one document, Bridget resolutely affirms that that is correct. But no one asks her what the document was. Afterwards, Bridget declares the truth: ‘ “But the paper as we signed […] wasn’t the old gentleman’s will, — no more than this is;” and she lifted up her apron. “I’m rightly sure of that” ’ (p. 631). Trollope’s novel allows us to ponder for a moment the psychological state of a witness under cross-examination who is asked the wrong question and who must observe a wrongful verdict returned because the right question was never posed.
On an ampler scale, Orley Farm invites its reader to speculate about what is not, or cannot be, said in another sense. Trollope the fictional realist is, here, as in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866–7), exploring what could be called a psychological aesthetic of silence. His narrative probes the magnetic power of a character whose mind the reader can barely know. The doubling of the plot of Orley Farm works revealingly in this context. Trollope’s novel is structured by two main narratives that together form a kind of chiasmus. (In fact, as Coral Lansbury sensibly observes, Trollope’s plot more generally involves a sustained doubling of principal characters, particularly those concerned with some form of contractual relationship.39) In the Furnival plot, a man is innocent but is believed, by his wife, to be guilty. In the Lady Mason plot, a woman is widely believed to be innocent when she is actually guilty. In the Furnival plot there is a history of frustration and pain, of wilful silence on his part and forlorn loneliness on hers; in the Lady Mason plot, there is much pain but it is wrapped up in a silence that is not wilful but necessary. The central psychological interest in Orley Farm is that which the reader has to guess at: what does it feel like to keep a guilty secret for twenty years? What does a quarter of a century of obligatory wordlessness do to a human being? Lucius remarks that his mother is moved ‘by an insane dread of some coming evil’ (p. 297). It is one of the tiniest, but nonetheless most telling, glimpses that Trollope allows his reader into the mind of a character who has committed, and got away with, a serious crime.
Silence defines Lady Mason — and Millais, Trollope’s illustrator, understood this feature of the novel. In turn, he provided Trollope and his publisher with an eloquently unrevealing image of ‘Lady Mason after her confession’.40 Her face barely visible, Mary Mason looks downwards, her body contracted, her state of mind only guessable from gesture and pose. Millais’s wordless image is an apt visual counterpart to Trollope’s largely wordless heroine, whose greatest moment, perhaps, is a gesture not a verbal statement. During the course of composing Orley Farm for serialization, Trollope significantly developed his ability to deal with the demands of four-chapter instalments. Writing Framley Parsonage, beforehand, he had not always been so successful in his efforts to accommodate part publication.41 But in working on Orley Farm, Trollope became more confident, as Mary Hamer has usefully demonstrated.42 Part of the skill involved the placing of well-handled climactic conclusions for each four-chapter groups, of which the ending of Chapter 44 — the final chapter of the instalment for January 1862 — is the most remarkable. But not so much the less remarkable is the close of Chapter 64, the final chapter for the instalment of June 1862. This narrates Lady Mason’s first entry into the courtroom at Alston, where, as she sits down, the man she has defrauded looks at her. Trollope’s final lines make clear where the reader’s sympathies should lie despite what exactly the law demands; his words affirm the strength Lady Mason has despite the crime she has committed, and how ashamed — bizarrely enough, because he is right — her accuser should be. ‘As she thus looked her gaze fell on one face that she had not seen for years,’ Trollope’s instalment concludes,
and their eyes met. It was the face of Joseph Mason of Groby, who sat opposite to her; and as she looked at him her own countenance did not quail for a moment. Her own countenance did not quail; but his eyes fell gradually down, and when he raised them again she had averted her face. (p. 528)
After reading of Lady Mason’s brilliantly concise signal, and feeling the communicative power of what words do not say, the subscriber to Anthony Trollope’s new novel had to wait another four weeks for the story to resume. Orley Farm is peculiarly good — among other things — at making unforgettable the significance of meaning that exists in bodily poise, in human gesture, or, here, in the speaking force of motionless eyes.
There is an oddity, a conceptual tension, in Trollope’s impatience with barristers for using words, voice, rhetoric, and gesture to persuade. For they are not so different from the realist novelist himself. Trollope is wrong about some important things from the real world in Orley Farm and his legal readers wanted the novel to be more of a force for change than he was equipped to achieve. But, as Oscar Wilde eloquently understood in ‘The Truth of Masks’, there is a difference between accuracy and truthfulness.43 With his sophisticated understanding of what fictional realism can do in relation to the real world, Trollope explored in Orley Farm how literary words could evoke, for the alert reader, that which lay beyond their mere descriptive or representative power. This Dickensian novel-with-a-purpose dislikes advocacy, and is vehemently suspicious, as Montaigne more concisely was, of the uses of persuasion.44 Yet Orley Farm, at the same time, is an example of how Anthony Trollope at the height of his powers — in the impressive setting of Waltham House and all it signified — could persuade readers by his writing, by advocating through fictional words the emotional and psychological credibility of vividly imagined men and women.
Writing at a moment when Trollope’s status among serious readers of fiction was still unsettled, Ruth apRoberts observed in 1971 that ‘Because we have not been able to talk about him in […] non-aesthetic categories [as, for instance, a Jamesian novelist with a philosophy], and because our poetics-aesthetic has kept him out of art, we have hardly known what to do with him. So we just read him.’45 But, now, Trollope’s characterization, his capacity to tell rewarding and un-putdownable stories, and the intriguing distances that exist between the events of the plot and exactly how his narrator describes them, are no longer doubted as merely populist or insufficiently sophisticated, as somehow needing to be apologized for. Trollope, with his critical fortunes higher than they have ever been, has obtained the critical audience, and the critical framework, to enable us to see and appreciate what is convincing about his art. In turn, we can recognize how Anthony Trollope, writing Orley Farm, was finally at home: at home both in Waltham Cross and, triumphantly, in the serial installations of his own distinctive version of the realist novel. Doubtful of persuaders in this novel, he is also remarkably good at persuading.