He was perhaps lucky that he did not succeed, for I suspect that he would have meshed with the House of Commons no more happily than did, say, Hilaire Belloc nearly forty years later, and that the sourness of The Way We Live Now (1875) might have spilled over from its financial, literary and social milieu into the more political background of The Duke’s Children (1880) and produced a more discontented culmination to the political novels. However, it did not happen, and The Duke’s Children is essentially a good-tempered book. A few minor characters behave ludicrously, but only those who are created for villainy behave villainously, and even they, notably Major Tifto, do so rather pathetically.
Trollope was therefore able to remain relatively starry-eyed towards politics, much more like Harold Nicolson than like Belloc. Nicolson, essayist of near genius, biographer of quality, novelist with too exiguous an output to be properly judged in this category, always attached more importance to being a third-rate politician than to being a first-rate writer. After he lost his seat he recorded that he could never pass near to the Palace of Westminster at night and see shining the light which indicated that the House of Commons was still sitting without feeling a twinge of dismay that he was no longer there. I have always experienced exactly the reverse. But Trollope would have been with Nicolson. He would have liked to be there.
Indeed, he always liked being there, in the gallery of the House of Commons if he could not be on the floor, in the Garrick Club, in the Reform Club, in a literary circle, at a publishers’ evening party, at the kill in the hunting field. And this, combined with great technical skill, gives to his writing a gusto, a tolerance and an insight which puts him, after Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, on the fourth plinth in the pantheon of English mid-nineteenth-century novelists. And nowhere are these qualities better used than in The Duke’s Children.
Two Hundred Years of The Times
This was written for publication in a special Times supplement for the 200th anniversary of that newspaper in 1984
Newspapers, Perhaps because few of them achieve it, like longevity. As a result centenaries and bicentenaries are sometimes celebrated with a tenuous claim to continuity of identity. This is not true of The Times. It has throughout been a daily (always excluding Sundays), and its format, up to 1966, when news first appeared on the front page, bore a recognizable affinity to that of the first years.
The direct descendants of its founder, publisher and first editor, John Walter, remained as controlling proprietors until 1908, when Northcliffe moved in; and as partners in the enterprise for another fifty-eight years, until the arrival of Roy Thomson, when John Walter IV, aged ninety-three, relinquished his shareholding. (The Walters were almost unique among newspaper proprietors in spanning nearly two hundred years while hardly seeking and never acquiring a peerage.)
In addition the terms of editors, with a few exceptions, have been long. As a result there have been remarkably few of them. Six covered the 124 years from 1817 to 1941. There was a little more instability at either end, but fifteen made up the whole of the apostolic succession for the first two hundred years, exactly the same as the number of Popes over the period, a few more than the number of British monarchs but less than half the number of British Prime Ministers and little more than a third the number of American Presidents. (In the nine subsequent years, however, there have been no less than four editors.)
Has the influence been commensurate with the longevity? First, it must be said that while there have certainly been journals that have from time to time exercised more political influence than The Times (the Morning Chronicle in the early years of the nineteenth century, perhaps the Westminster Gazette in its heyday, the Daily Telegraph at the time of the Abdication, arguably the Daily Mirror at its Cudlipp/King political peak), there has been no paper that has come within miles of rivalling The Times over the two-hundred-year stretch as a whole.
Apart from other considerations there are very few papers that have been there for any comparable period. The Observer, which has benefited from two notable editorships this century, was founded in 1791, but has never been a daily and went through many nineteenth-century mutations. The Morning Post was there before The Times and preserved a continuous high Tory identity until subsiding into the arms of the Daily Telegraph in 1937. The rest of The Times’s London contemporaries of 1785 are long since dead. Its contemporaries of today are relative upstarts: the oldest are the Guardian, founded in 1821, but only a daily since 1855, the Daily Telegraph, which began in 1855, and the Daily Mail, which inaugurated the era of mass circulation in 1896.