‘He is a gentleman, papa.’
‘So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman. The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock. The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter.’
‘I do not know any other way of dividing people,’ said she …
Tregear then somewhat improves his position in the Duke’s eyes by becoming a Member of Parliament, even if as a Tory, a party which the Duke, rather ahead of his time in this respect, regarded as socially as well as ideologically inferior. This, it might have been thought, would make Tregear’s financial position more not less precarious, but this was never the core of the objection, and is more than compensated for by an increase of status and by the fact that it gives him some claim to have an occupation even if not a profession (although what profession would the Duke have wished him to follow?). More important than Tregear’s advancement, however, is the Duke’s softening under the unrelenting determination of Lady Mary, accompanied by the unanimous advice of all the duennas in sight that the alternative to allowing her to marry Tregear is to see her grow into a sour old maid.
Meanwhile, Silverbridge’s affairs, assisted by his much greater freedom than that of his sister (‘How I do wish I were a man,’ she said to him in his private hansom cab, ‘… I’d have a hansom of my own and go where I pleased’), developed in a more complicated way. He too was an MP for the wrong party although for the right place, the borough of Silverbridge (everything is almost too perfectly matched in The Duke’s Children). He entered into a racing partnership with Major Tifto which led to his losing £70,000 on the St Leger, which was a lot of Victorian money even for the Omnium estates. (It was in fact exactly the sum which Trollope earned from his forty-seven novels.) He moved from one girl to another. The first was Lady Mabel Grex, the daughter of a Tory earl of impeccable lineage, strained resources and mildly reprobate tastes, who was just respectable enough to have acquired a Garter. Lady Mab was pretty (in a way that sounded healthy rather than romantic), pert, self-confident, and to begin with a good sort, thoroughly prepared to marry Silverbridge, although in love not with him but with her cousin, the ubiquitous although self-controlled heart-throb Tregear. In addition she was thoroughly acceptable to the Duke.
She made the mistake of treating Silverbridge as though he were an immature boy, which he was. But that may well have made no difference, for he soon met the American Isabel Boncassen, whom Trollope comes very near to describing as the greatest beauty in the world. She was certainly a real girl of the golden west, or at least as far west as Fifth Avenue. She was on a long visit to Europe with her parents and seemed quite disposed to see it extended into permanence by a grand English marriage. The 1870s were the early days of the infusion of American blood and money into the upper ranks of the peerage, and Trollope was very à la mode in making this a central feature of the last of his political novels. In the earlier ones, around a decade earlier, ‘foreigners’ were more typically represented by Madam Max Goesler, the lady of Austrian property who became Mrs Phineas Finn, or Ferdinand Lopez, the dago adventurer who ended by throwing himself under a train at Willesden Junction.
Miss Boncassen’s mother was ‘homely’ but her father Ezekiel Boncassen was given the appearance and dress of Lincoln, although he was rich with second-generation wealth, scholarly, and, in a homespun way, of refined manners. He was also spoken of as a possible President of the United States, which was odd, for no one of remotely his type got near the White House between John Quincy Adams fifty years before and Theodore Roosevelt twenty-five years afterwards.
The Duke of Omnium much enjoyed grave comparative political conversations with Mr Boncassen, found Mrs Boncassen inoffensive, Miss Boncassen decorative and ladylike, and invited them all to stay (together with Silverbridge, Lady Mary, Lady Mab and the Phineas Finns) for two weeks at his lesser but more agreeable country seat in Yorkshire. He hoped that the visit would result in the arrangement of a marriage between Silverbridge and Mabel Grex, and was as amazed as he was dismayed when it was the New York girl who emerged as the winner of the duchess stakes.
Trollope is one of the four novelists who have given me the greatest sum of pleasure - ‘sum’ indicating quantity as well as intensity. The other three are Proust, Waugh and Anthony Powell. This does not mean that I regard them as the four greatest. I have no doubt that Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen and George Eliot, to name only an almost random half dozen, are in some sense ‘greater’ than at least two, including Trollope, of my quartet. In the same way I accept that the cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges are ‘greater’ than those of Chichester and Exeter, but the sum of pleasure from the latter two is none the less more, if only because I have visited them more often, partly through opportunity and partly through choice. And there is also the factor of special affinity, which, for example, and switching to art galleries, the Frick, the Moritzhuis and the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow possess for me and the Kunsthistorische and the Rijksmuseum do not. And as Trollope is the most prolific of my four authors he has a strong claim to the highest position on a graph that measures output along one axis and pleasure-giving quality along the other.