The renaissance of Glasgow has become a byword. The English city most like Glasgow is Liverpool, by virtue of its geography, the composition of its population, the historic nature of its trade, the eminence of its pre-1914 position (’Liverpool gentlemen and Manchester men’ was the catchphrase) and the grandeur of its Victorian public buildings. The trough into which it descended was deeper than anything that has ever beset Glasgow. But when I went there two weeks ago I was struck by the fact that it seemed to have experienced an upturn in the past year or so. And the suggestion that aroused the greatest enthusiasm was that they might be following in Glasgow’s path. At a time when cities as big as Calcutta, as rich as Cleveland, as beautiful as Florence, decline more easily than they revive, Glasgow’s experience of the 1980s, admittedly building on a very good base, but after a period of foolish disregard, may stand out as the epitome of recovery through quality and effort.
High Victorian Trollope
An introduction to The Duke’s Children
The Last of the six political novels and the penultimate book of Trollope’s life, The Duke’s Children is a classical and perfectly matured example of his style and method. It is the apotheosis of his chronicles of the unending and fluctuating war between love and property. Although this is a campaign unmitigated by any hope of complete victory for either side, it is in general one in which, under Trollope’s guidance, the strictest rules of civilized warfare apply.
There is no place for methods of barbarism in Trollope. And this is particularly true of The Duke’s Children. The commanders on both sides are of the highest possible rank, Napoleon and Wellington, as it were, and do everything at the right time, in a predictable way, which leads to a satisfactory conclusion after eighty chapters of easy-flowing narrative that are also a compendious and reliable guide to the high Whig world (with a few Tories allowed in) of 125 years ago.
‘The Duke’, who combines an almost sacerdotal respect for aristocracy with firm attachment to moderate Liberalism, and great wealth with distaste for self-indulgence, is of course our old friend Plantagenet Palliser, who a million words and twenty years after grappling with decimal currency and marrying Lady Glencora MacCluskie, is Duke of Omnium and a former Prime Minister of a brief-lived coalition government. On the first page of this book Trollope kills off Duchess Glencora, a little cursorily considering how much spirit she had infused into the earlier political novels. I think his motive was probably the same as that which makes many writers of detective stories kill the corpse before the reader has a chance of identifying with it. Trollope, who always operated on tight emotional rations, wished to get on as quickly as possible to the Duke’s problem of being left with three more-or-less grown-up children, for dealing with whom his combination of gruff affection and stubborn censoriousness was peculiarly inappropriate, without diverting the reader’s sympathy on to a character who was inessential to this story.
The three were the twenty-two-year-old Earl of Silverbridge, the nineteen-year-old Lady Mary Palliser and the eighteen-year-old Lord Gerald Palliser. The third never presumes to attract more of the reader’s attention than is appropriate to a younger son, and confines himself to a few horse-racing and card-playing scrapes which are suitable to anyone called Lord Gerald and sufficient to get him sent down from Trinity College, Cambridge. The story centres around the other two and their inappropriate if wholly uxoriously directed amours.
Lady Mary falls determinedly in love with another younger son who is more presumptuous than her brother Gerald, particularly as he is the younger son not of a Whig duke but of a Cornish Tory squire, and who is adequately in love with her. Frank Tregear is a little two-dimensional but he is neither an upstart nor an adventurer, unlike Burgo Fitzgerald who in the dim and distant past had excited the emotions, but not, fortunately, the matrimonial determination, of Lady Glencora MacCluskie. He is indisputably if almost too resolutely a gentleman, the closest friend of Lord Silverbridge (which is considered in no way inappropriate), with whom he was at Eton and Christ Church. His family is said to be more ancient than the Pallisers, but he is not considered by the Duke, nor indeed by Silverbridge, who is devoted to him in every other way, to have sufficient substance to aspire to the hand of Lady Mary. This is despite the fact that the one thing Lady Mary does not need is substance, for the Duke, who has far more money than he thinks it decent to spend on himself or than is good for Silverbridge and Gerald, could provide for them many times over.
This provokes some fine animadversions on gentlemanliness and who is and who is not appropriate to marry a duke’s daughter: