Anthony Trollope 
The Prime Minister
Where is Tenway Junction?
The suicide of Ferdinand Lopez is regarded as one of the finest things in Trollope’s late fiction. An adventurer of dubious foreign extraction (even he, we are told on the first page, does not know who, or of what nationality, or of what ethnicity were his grandparents), Lopez has successfully invaded the upper echelons of English society. By preying on the susceptibilities of Lady Palliser with his un-English smoothness of manner, he has almost gained election to Parliament. He has won a monied English bride. He has, for a while, been prosperous in the City of London. Finally, Lopez’s house of cards falls. He is disgraced politically (bringing down Plantagenet Palliser’s administration with him), wholly alienated from his wife (whom he has abused dreadfully), and ruined financially.
The last twelve hours of Lopez’s life show him still going mechanically through the forms and rituals of a gentleman’s existence. He takes dinner in his club in St James. He then undertakes a long peregrination on foot through nocturnal London. It is March, and a sleety, blustery night. He has an umbrella over his silk top hat. His route through the different quarters of the city is described by Trollope in meticulous topographic detail:
he went round by Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand, and up some dirty streets by the small theatres, and so on to Holborn and by Bloomsbury Square up to Tottenham Court Road, then through some unused street into Portland Place, along the Marylebone Road, and back to Manchester Square by Baker Street. (Chapter 60)
One can trace his circuitous route on any London, A-to-Z, and it seems that Lopez, as he stands on the brink of eternity, wishes to see as many facets of fashionable, low-life, and bohemian London as is possible on a single night. On his way, he is ‘spoken to frequently by unfortunates of both sexes’ (the only reference that I know in decent Victorian fiction to male prostitutes, or ‘rent boys’, of the kind who were to bring Oscar Wilde to ruin in 1895). Once home in his Manchester Square mansion, Lopez comes face to face with the utter impossibility of his position. Early the next morning he leaves his house for the last time. It is still raining hard. He looks for a cab, but – as is invariably the case in London when it rains – none is to be found. In Baker Street he takes an omnibus (horse-drawn at this date) which carries him as far as ‘the underground railway [i.e. what is now the Baker Street station], and by that he went to Gower Street [i.e. what is now the Euston Square station, on the Circle Line]’. As is his usual practice, Trollope has set the action of his novel very close to the present. The underground line (served by steam engines, and not a very attractive mode of transport) had been open since 1863. Lopez then crosses the Euston Road and walks 200 yards or so through the rain to the Euston Station. This great terminus, open since 1847, served in the 1870s as the gateway to the West and North. Again, Trollope gives us real names for these very real London places.
Lopez breakfasts on a mutton chop at the station café. Charmer to the end, he cannot forebear from flirting with the waitress. He then goes into the ticket-hall, and buys ‘a first-class return ticket, not for Birmingham, but for the Tenway Junction’. The return ticket suggests that he has not yet decided irrevocably to kill himself – but there seems no other reason for him to go to Tenway Junction. Had he wished merely to disappear from the eyes of men under an alias, or abroad, he would surely have packed a bag and raised some cash. Trollope then embarks on a long description of Lopez’s destination which opens, paradoxically, with the statement that any such description is, of course, wholly superfluous:
It is quite unnecessary to describe the Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it. From this spot, some six or seven miles distant from London, lines diverge east, west, and north, north-east, and north-west, round the metropolis in every direction, and with direct communication with every other line in and out of London. It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what some one tells them. The space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for a large farm. And these rails always run into another with sloping points, and cross passages, and mysterious meandering sidings, till it seems to the thoughtful stranger to be impossible that the best trained engine should know its own line. Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of wagons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and others furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes without a train going here or there, some rushing by without noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of substantial lightning, and others stopping, disgorging and taking up passengers by the hundreds. Men and women, – especially the men, for the women knowing their ignorance are generally willing to trust to the pundits of the place, – look doubtful, uneasy, and bewildered. But they all do get properly placed and unplaced, so that the spectator at last acknowledges that over all this apparent chaos there is presiding a great genius of order. (Ch. 60)
Lopez, having contemplated the marvellous geometry of the Junction, walks down the bevelled end of a platform, into the path of the morning express from Inverness to London, which is coming round the curve into the station ‘at a thousand miles an hour’. He is ‘knocked into bloody atoms’. He who, we are told in the first chapter, came from nowhere returns to oblivion.
The description of Tenway Junction and Lopez’s suicide reveals an unexpectedly Dickensian aspect to Trollope’s genius, recalling as it does Carker’s symbolically charged death in Dombey and Son. There are added felicities: traditionally, suicides were buried in unhallowed ground at crossroads, and what more impressive crossroads has the world ever seen than this? There are, however, some baffling elements in the scene. As has been noted, Trollope opens with the declaration that it is unnecessary to describe something which he then proceeds to describe at great length. Baffling again is the assertion that ‘It is quite unnecessary to describe the Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it.’ Not every reader does. Elsewhere, to my chagrin, I have identified Tenway as Clapham Junction, which is clearly wrong, since Tenway is specifically indicated as being to the north of London and Clapham lies due south.1 It must, presumably, be the Grand Junction at Willesden, in Middlesex: the point at which the (then privatized) Great Western, North London, London and North West, and Midland lines converged as they entered and left the Greater London network. (This identification is correctly made by the Oxford World’s Classics editor, Jennifer Uglow.)
Most baffling, why does Trollope not give ‘Tenway’ its proper name? The pseudonym is not very brilliant (as Henry James pointed out, unlike his master, Thackeray, Trollope was not gifted in the ‘science of names’). And pseudonymy jars with the accuracy of the earlier description of Lopez’s night and morning peregrinations through London – all that cartographically exact business about Trafalgar Square, the Strand, and Baker Street. It may be, of course, that Trollope did not want to inspire copy-cat suicides. The Victorian was not as litigious an age as ours, but it may also be that Trollope did not want to libel the Willesden station-master by suggesting that his precautions against injury to passengers were insufficient.2
Plausible as these motives may be, it is more likely that Trollope fictionalized Willesden Junction for artistic reasons. Tenway Junction is not merely a busy railway station, any more than the great concourse which Thackeray describes in ‘Before the Curtain’ (in Vanity Fair) is merely a London street fair. Both are allegories of Victorian society. When he wrote The Prime Minister Trollope was well aware that his own death was not far off. He had given up the hunting he loved, and his health was failing. Like Lopez, he was standing on the edge of his own mortality. What Trollope desired at the climax of his narrative was a scene which should transcend the mere accidents of London topography. He wanted – like the hero of one of Browning’s great monologues – to outreach himself, to exceed, for once, the Trollopian.