Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer

Despite Anthony Trollope’s familiar persona as a bluff and hearty Englishman, it was Ireland, not England, that launched his career as a writer.¹ His early life was shadowed by years of failure at school and as an unhappy junior clerk in the Post Office in London. He was twenty-six years old before he moved to a new role as a surveyor’s assistant in Ireland, working for the Post Office. His posthumously-published An Autobiography (1883) describes his arrival in 1841 as a transformative moment: “From the day I set foot in Ireland, all these evils went away from me” (Trollope 2014, Chap. 4).

With a novelist’s instinct to impose order on life’s untidiness, Trollope is inclined to identify his move to Ireland as a quasi-magical turning point in his life. But there is no doubt that his Irish adventure changed his prospects for the better, giving him the confidence and sense of purpose that enabled him to turn his longstanding literary ambitions into reality. His first two novels (The MacDermots of Ballycloran was published in 1847 and The Kellys and the O’Kellys followed in 1848) were written and set in Ireland, and he returned to an Irish setting in Castle Richmond, published in 1860, shortly after Trollope left Ireland for England in 1859. Uncertain in tone and in narrative perspective, Castle Richmond deals at some length with the famine and its distressing consequences. Like its two Irish predecessors, it met with a cool reception, and its sales figures were poor. Readers, as those who published fiction knew very well, were not eager to read about events in Ireland, and they certainly had no wish to learn more about the miseries of the famine. “It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others,” as Henry Colburn warned Trollope after the publication of The Kellys and the O’Kellys (Trollope 2014, Chap. 4).

These novels brought no critical or commercial success, but that did not discourage Trollope from returning to Irish themes – notably in the fiction which traces the political career of Phineas Finn, that up-and-coming “Irish Member.” Phineas Finn was published as a monthly serial (1867–1868), and was followed by Phineas Redux (1873–1874). Looking back over his career in his autobiography, Trollope described Phineas’s Irishness as a “blunder”: “There was nothing to be gained from the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England.” In practice, as Trollope goes on to note, Phineas’s identity as an Irishman did him no harm: “In spite of this, Phineas succeeded” (Trollope 2014, Chap. 17).

An Eye for an Eye, a short novel which turns on themes of seduction and violence, is the fourth of Trollope’s novels predominantly set in Ireland. An Eye for an Eye owes much to the influence of the sensation novel in its reflections on innocence, oppression, and vengeance. Written in 1870, it was not published until 1878, and like Trollope’s earlier Irish fiction it was not well received. And yet the novel’s treatment of tragedy and waste arising from incompatible codes of value has genuine power. R. H. Hutton, always among the shrewdest of Trollope’s critics, noted in The Spectator that “there is something in the atmosphere of Ireland which appears to rouse [Trollope’s] imagination and give force and simplicity to his pictures of life” (1879, 210). At the end of his writing life, Trollope made one last attempt to interest his readers in an Irish subject. His final novel (the unfinished The Landleaguers, posthumously published in 1883, with eleven of the sixty planned chapters unwritten) addressed the violent political conflict over land reform in Ireland in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and is exceptional in his oeuvre in its direct engagement with recent controversies.

Ireland mattered to Trollope. It was his home for nearly twenty years, the period in which he became a highly regarded public servant, a settled family man, and a successful writer. He was grateful for what the country had done for him, and long after his return to England he remained interested in Ireland’s political and religious divisions and their roots in the troubled history of its people: “The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever – the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England – economical and hospitable” (Trollope 2014, Chap. 4). In some ways, he felt closer to Ireland than he did to an England which had never seemed to be on his side in his early years:

It has been my fate to have so close an intimacy with Ireland, that when I meet an Irishman abroad I always recognize in him more of a kinsman than I do in your Englishman. I never ask an Englishman from what county he comes, or what was his town. To Irishmen I usually put such a question, and I am generally familiar with the old haunts which they name. (Chap. 16)

Trollope’s novels were famously described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “just as English as a beef-steak” (Chap. 8), but Ireland allowed Trollope to see English life with something of an outsider’s eye, and this was to his lasting benefit as a novelist. Though his Irish sympathies are persistently influenced by the Englishness that formed his primary identity, just as his Englishness was inflected by his formative Irish experiences, he is now often interpreted as at least in part an Irish writer.

Why did Ireland make such a difference? One reason lay in the cheerfully welcoming society that Trollope found waiting for him on his arrival. Trollope was a gregarious young man, and he took to his new opportunities for a lively social life with relish. He joined the order of freemasons (and remained a member for the rest of his life), which gave him access to the society of the local great houses. His early financial troubles began to lift, and he had the money to pursue his new enthusiasm for hunting. For the first time, he was seen as someone with a measure of standing and respect, and – still more cheeringly – he found himself to be attractive to the kind of young woman that he found attractive. Ireland represented freedom, together with some degree of romantic excitement and, after some time, sexual fulfilment: “It was altogether a very jolly life that I led in Ireland” (Trollope 2014, Chap. 4).

It was in Ireland that Trollope became a married man. Rose Heseltine, the woman who became his wife in 1844, was a level-headed woman from Yorkshire. The courtship and engagement proceeded at a headlong pace (after only two weeks’ acquaintance), reflecting the new and more confident identity that Trollope was making for himself. These experiences found their way into Trollope’s novels. The charming Phineas Finn is no intellectual giant, but his seemingly irresistible appeal to a series of intelligent women (Laura Standish, Violet Effingham, Madame Max Goesler) is associated with his Irishness. Though the vacuous but sexually magnetic Burgo FitzGerald is not an Irishman, his unmistakably Irish name hints at his erotic appeal. As Roy Foster has noted, a “debt Ireland owes to Trollope is his vision of the Irish as sexy. It is a more appealing stereotype than most, and another reason to welcome Trollope into the Irish literary canon” (2015).

As a civil servant working for the Post Office, Trollope was initially based in the small rural town of Bannagher, in County Offaly (in the province of Leinster, a central region in what is now the Republic of Ireland). Bannagher was a backwater, but Trollope’s experience of the country was not limited to its quiet streets. He was, as he recalls, “always moving about”, as he rode up and down the country in order to plan postal routes (Trollope 2014, Chap. 4). This gave him the opportunity to learn about the country on the basis of day-to-day experience, and over the years he became better informed about its geographical layout, its communities, and its tensions than many who had lived in Ireland all their lives. After his marriage, Trollope and his new wife lived in Clonmel, a larger town in County Tipperary. His growing professional success and expanding knowledge of the country was inexorably leading to something other than social assurance and an increasing income. He was acquiring an interest in the political context of the forces shaping the towns and villages, big houses and dilapidated cottages, churches and chapels, farms and shops and castles that he encountered every day.

Trollope’s treatment of Irish themes and Irish characters amounted to more than the exploitation of a colourfully dramatic setting for his novels. But his identity as a self-confessed “advanced Conservative-Liberal” (Trollope 2014, Chap. 16) who was much better-informed and far more sympathetic in his approach to Irish questions than was usual in writers of his class and generation often led him into ambivalent and sometimes contradictory points of view. He was consistent in his impatience with his English countrymen’s refusal to take Irish issues seriously, contenting themselves instead with clichés and caricatures. Trollope does not condescend to the Irish. He was equally consistent in his scorn for absentee English landlords, who were in his view responsible for many of Ireland’s troubles. Here as elsewhere in his work he was angered by injustice, greed, and dishonesty, and he saw plenty of that kind of corruption in English dealings with Ireland. First-hand experience led him to advocate for effective land reform, and he was much more positive about the role of the Irish Catholic church and its priests than might have been expected from a Protestant Englishman. But he had no time for the concept of Home Rule, which he regarded as “an absurdity from beginning to end” (Trollope 2011). In The Landleaguers, the last of his novels set in Ireland, Trollope’s implacable hostility to the agrarian rebels who had grown from the violent and inept Ribbonmen of The Macdermots of Ballycloran into a powerful political force shows how far he had moved from a balanced engagement with the conflicts that continue to divide Ireland in the wake of Charles Parnell’s influence. The national identity of Ireland was no more stable than that of England, and in Trollope’s view neither country was changing for the better.

Given that Trollope had made his name in representing (however ambivalently) the traditions of the Anglican church, his relatively sympathetic treatment of the Roman Catholicism he encountered in Ireland is one of the unexpected features of his treatment of Irish society. He was never anti-Catholic, and was impatient with the increasing suspicion and hostility that marked the English response to the wave of impoverished Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in the 1840s and the later establishment of a hierarchy of Catholic dioceses in England and Wales in 1850 – the so-called “papal aggression.” He knew many Irish Catholic priests, and on the whole liked and respected them. His English Catholic friends included John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, who was a longstanding admirer of Trollope’s fiction. The two men remained close after Newman’s conversion to Catholicism (Newman’s canonisation in 2019 means that Trollope has become the only Victorian novelist who can count a saint among his fans). Though Trollope was never remotely inclined to follow Newman’s example and convert to Catholicism, his own religious position was closer to that of comparatively high Anglicanism than that of the low church, and in general he was disposed to scorn the evangelicals and “under-bred dissenters” (Trollope 1989, Chap. 47) who regularly appear in his novels. They did not fall within Trollope’s exacting if somewhat vague definition what it meant to be a gentleman, and for Trollope the code of values that underpinned gentility, loosely associated in his mind with the established institutions of the English church and state, was an essential qualification for a clergyman of any conviction.

Nevertheless it was Trollope’s view, commonly held by those of his class and generation, that Protestant belief was more conducive than Roman Catholic faith to the enterprise and industry that led to national prosperity. In his account of his travels in North America and Canada, published in 1862, he is very firm on the matter. Writing of the Catholics he had encountered in Canada, he claims that.

Surely one may declare as a fact that a Roman Catholic population can never hold its ground against one that is Protestant. I do not speak of numbers, for the Roman Catholics will increase and multiply, and stick by their religion, although their religion entails poverty and dependence; as they have done and still do in Ireland. But in progress and wealth the Romanists have always gone to the wall when the two have been made to compete together. And yet I love their religion. There is something beautiful and almost divine in the faith and obedience of a true son of the Holy Mother. I sometimes fancy that I would fain be a Roman Catholic, – if I could; as also I would often wish to be still a child, if that were possible. (Trollope 1862, vol. 1, Chap. 4)

For Trollope, the point was that Catholicism seemed to undermine any capacity for the independent thought that he thought essential to moral and intellectual maturity.

And yet here too Trollope’s response is divided. He was inclined to approve of the older generation of Catholic priests he met in Ireland. They were, for the most part, cultivated men who had been educated on the Continent, and as he saw them they were invaluable advocates of wholesome moderation in the movements for radical political change that were making themselves felt in Ireland. He was much more suspicious of the new generation of curates and priests who had been trained at the seminary at Maynooth, near Dublin, an institution supported with funding from the British government. In 1835, the Tory journal Blackwood’s Magazine lamented the change brought about by the rapid growth of this seminary:

Before its establishment, the Catholic students were sent to St Omer, Salamanca, or some other foreign seminary; and if they received little practical benefit from the tenets which were there taught, they at least mingled with young persons of all nations, and insensibly contracted a certain portion of liberality from their intercourse with men of many different countries and professions, or shades. Thence the many liberal and enlightened priests, who, in the last twenty years, adorned the Romish priesthood of Ireland. But since the influence of the education of almost all the Catholic clergy at Maynooth, the influence of these counteracting principles of good has been entirely lost. The young Irish priests, drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the peasantry, are sent universally to Maynooth, where, instead of enlightened foreign ecclesiastics, or young foreigners of the world, they meet nothing but furious zealots in the teachers, and barbarian bigots in the students themselves. ([Anon.] 1835; quoted in McCourt 2015, 175)

The men trained at Maynooth were more likely than their foreign-educated predecessors to advocate political action to address the need for reform. The controversy generated by this shift was exacerbated in 1845, at the time Trollope was writing The Macdermots of Ballycloran, when the British government’s annual grant to Maynooth was increased from £9,000 to £26,000.

Trollope respected the solid or even fervent commitment he saw in many of the clergymen he knew, but he was suspicious of any ambition to convert Protestants to the Roman Catholic faith. Father John Barham, the zealous priest in The Way We Live Now, is characterised as a good and entirely sincere man. But his conversion to Catholicism, and his wish to persuade others to follow him, represents a kind of faith that seemed to Trollope an abnegation of personal autonomy:

To him it was everything that a man should believe and obey, – that he should abandon his own reason to the care of another or of others, and allow himself to be guided in all things by authority. Faith being sufficient and of itself all in all, moral conduct could be nothing to a man, except as a testimony of faith. The dogmas of his Church were to Father Barham a real religion, and he would teach them in season and out of season. (Trollope 2016, Chap. 16)

The idea that faith could excuse immoral behaviour was anathema to Trollope. Unquestioning obedience could not be, in his view, the proper role of religion in a well-managed life.

But Father Barham is not Irish. Born into the English gentry, Barham was converted as a student at Oxford, having been influenced by the appeal of high Anglican doctrines of Tractarianism. Whether they were the sophisticated products of a European education or their less polished curates, the Catholic priests that Trollope came to know in Ireland were made of different stuff, and they were generally more alert to matters of this world. Father Marty, the Irish priest (“educated in France”) who is the only friend of the isolated Mrs. O’Hara and her daughter Kate in An Eye for an Eye, is a morally upright but worldly man. He is keen to see Kate make a fortunate marriage, whether to a Protestant or Catholic suitor. Father Marty encourages the match with the eligible Protestant Fred Neville, one of Trollope’s legion of well-meaning but inexperienced and weak young men. Father Marty

had been bred a priest from his youth upwards, and knew nothing of love; but nevertheless it was a pain to him to see a young girl, good-looking, healthy, fit to be the mother of children, pine away, unsought for, uncoupled, – as it would be a pain to see a fruit grow ripe upon the tree, and then fall and perish for the want of plucking. His philosophy was perhaps at fault, and it may be that his humanity was unrefined. But he was human to the core, – and, at any rate, unselfish. (Trollope 1992, Chap. 7)

When these hopes are destroyed by Fred Neville’s perfidy, Father Marty becomes the moral touchstone of the story, unflinching in his condemnation of Fred’s muddled betrayal.

Father Marty has little connection with the Protestant community of County Clare, but Trollope notes that during “the days of the famine Father Marty and the Earl and the Protestant vicar had worked together in the good cause” (Trollope 1992, Chap. 5). Having lived in Ireland throughout the 1840s, Trollope was among the small handful of English writers who were in a position to write about the Great Famine from first-hand experience. The Macdermots of Ballycloran, a relentlessly dark story about the ruin of a Catholic land-owning family, was written before the famine closed in, but its focus on the poor management of the land presages Trollope’s later analysis of the economic issues that made the famine so devastating. The Kellys and the O’Kellys was published in 1848, when the consequences of the famine were still widespread. Though this accomplished comic novel was upbeat in tone, and did not refer to the famine, it appeared at a time when the English reading public were notably reluctant to hear about Irish affairs, and this was among the reasons for the novel’s commercial failure.

It was only when Trollope had established himself in England, with several popular novels on English themes behind him (The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne), that he felt able to publish an Irish novel that addressed the famine directly. “I might have called this ‘A Tale of the Famine Year in Ireland,’” Trollope remarks of Castle Richmond (1860). But the novel struggles to combine its accounts of suffering, starvation, and death with a conventional courtship plot, and the result is an uneasy and sometimes offensive mixture of social and political commentary and romance. Trollope’s claim that, for all the human suffering that it entailed, the famine was a necessary precondition of the modernisation of Ireland’s economy is disconcerting at best, and at worst repellent. He had defended government policy in relation to the famine in a series of letters to The Examiner (August 1859–June 1860) (King 1965). In Castle Richmond he continues to praise the “wisdom and humanity” (79) of the relief efforts of Peel’s government in the early stages of the famine, a calamity which he sees as “ordained by Providence” (75). Broadly speaking, this remains his position in Castle Richmond:

It is in such emergencies as these that the watching and the wisdom of a government are necessary; and I shall always think – as I did think then – that the wisdom of its action and the wisdom of its abstinence from action were very good. (Trollope 1989, Chap. 31)

Trollope was not oblivious to the miseries of the famine, and his unsparing descriptions of the wretchedness he had seen do not lack compassion. Nevertheless, he thought – as he remarked in North America – that “Ireland’s Famine was the punishment of her imprudence and idleness, but it has given to her prosperity and progress” (Trollope 1862, vol. 2, Chap. 16).

As a firm supporter of the Union, Trollope believed that the long-term effect of the famine would be to align the culture and economy of Ireland more closely with those of England, thus encouraging England to recognise the particular strengths and potential of Ireland. What Ireland chiefly needed, in Trollope’s view, were the middle-class values of hard work, enterprise, and social responsibility that had driven the growing prosperity of England. But these hopes seemed doomed to failure. His last words on Ireland, written after two visits to the country in 1882, the year of his death, signalled his growing alienation from what he conceived to be the dangerous and destructive direction that the country was taking. He was appalled by the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin, where a breakaway group of Fenians (the “Invincibles”) killed Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, the permanent Under-Secretary, on 6 May 1882. Trollope’s hostility towards the Land League (formed in 1879 to campaign for tenants’ rights in Ireland) and the drive for Home Rule, was confirmed. The Landleaguers, still incomplete when Trollope died, was primarily written to protest against the Land War associated with the activities of the Land League, which were, though the League was formally opposed to violence, sometimes aggressive. Trollope was dismayed:

There can be no doubt that Ireland has been and still is in a most precarious condition, that life has been altogether unsafe there, and that property has been jeopardised in a degree unknown for many years in the British Islands. (Trollope 1993, Chap. 41)

He was exaggerating, and the febrile tone of the novel was hardly justified by the work of the Land League, which was in fact often a conciliatory organisation. But factors other than the movements of history lay behind the uncharacteristic animus of The Landleaguers. The Ireland that he had loved as a young man, the country that had saved his life, was disappearing, and with it his hope that Ireland and England could share a prosperous and united future. This was the greatest disappointment of Trollope’s political life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dinah Birch

Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, with particular interests in the work of John Ruskin and Anthony Trollope, and she is currently completing a short introduction to Trollope’s life and writing.

Notes

1 A version of this paper will appear in Dinah Birch’s Anthony Trollope: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). This paper was delivered in June 2023 at the day-long symposium, “Nineteenth-Century Literature and a Sense of Place: A Symposium in Honour of Keith Hanley.”