Trollope's Forms of Address

Trollope’s Forms of Address GEORGE WATSON

Trollope’s intercst in the ways people address one another is unique among English novelists. English forms of address, in any case, have so far received little systematic attention, whether in fiction or in life. Indeed it is doubtful if any novelist in the language, apart from Jane Austen, has ever been analysed in this aspect as a whole;’ and Chapman’s pio:neering note of half a century ago has stimulated little in the way of imitation. With Trollope the problem of address is almost inevitably more complicated, if only because of the sheer bulk of his fiction. His works include nearly fifty novels published between 1847 and 1883, and they total some nine million words.2 Spread over a period of composition nearly two generations long, the evidence is embarrassingly abundant. And yet, though abundant and diverse, it is not contradictory. A master of the obvious, Trollope lucidly describes what he hears and sees. If the accumulative pattern of evidence grows increasingly subtle and detailed, it alters only slightly as a whole.

With Jane Austen, as with most novelists, the pattern of address is relatively simple, amounting to little more than a single pattern of conventions unchanging as between characters, or subject to only minor variants. Her commonest variant is one familiar throughout nineteenth-century fiction, and no doubt in the life of the century too: the ‘glide’ whereby a man, as he prepares to propose marriage to a woman, modulates out of the more formal address into the less formal: ‘Miss Smith-Mary . . .’ The essential simplicity in Jane Austen might have encouraged Chapman to lay out the address- system of her six novels as a single diagram. In fact he preferred to compare the usage of his own day with hers, recording whatever looked odd to him at the time, and compared her vocabulary and forms of address with those he took for granted as an Edwardian Englishman. This confers upon his appendix a documentary interest: it is no longer true, for instance, to say that in Jane Austen ‘young

lR. W. Chapman, ‘Modes of Address’, an appendix to his edition of Pride and Prejudice (Oxford, 1923) pp. 49-12; see also K. C. Phillipps, Jane Ausfen’s English (London, 1970) pp. 208-16. A point of comparison may be found in Susan Ervin-Trip],, ‘On Sociolinguistic Rules: Alternation and Co-occurrence’, in Directions in Sociolinguistics, edited by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (New York, 1972), a technical analysis of address in the United States today. The student of literature remains to be convinced, however, that the invention of a special jargon advances the subject in any way.

ZGordon N. Ray, ‘Trollope at Full Length’, Huntington Library Quarterly xxi (1967-68), appendix A, ‘Trollope’s 47 Novels’, which lists word-estimates provided by Prof. A. Mizener.

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men spoke to and of each other much as they do today’, meaning by surnames. By now Chapman’s England has gone the way of Jane Austen’s.

Each new generation tends to deny its own formality, or to fail to notice it, or (which amounts to the same thing) to complain in old age that young people are not as respectful as they used to be. No doubt there is a plain sense in which formality diminishes, just as it is nearly always true that a currency buys a less than it once did. Address, like money, is subject to inflation. But it would be misleading to emphasize this inflation at the cost of other con- siderations. If it is true that a pound or a dollar buys less than it did, it is also true that most people have more of them. If first names are commoner in English address than they were in Trollope’s day, or commoner in Trollope’s than at the beginning of his century, it is also true that new forms have sprung up to replace the old. Patterns shift, but they remain patterns; and in no age, surely, do men and women simply address one another as equals. If degrees of respect and familiarity cannot be represented by formal terms of address, then they will be represented in some other way: by intonation, for example, or gesture. Since all societies are unequal, it seems safe to suppose that they will always find ways of representing the facts of their inequality.

Trollope limits himself severely. Modes of articulation, such as dialect, count for relatively little in him: far less, certainly, than in George Eliot, Hardy or Kipling. It is even a question how good his ear was, at least outside those middle and upper ranks of southern English society in which his fiction thrives. Henry James, in an essay on Trollope written a few months after his death in 1882, neatly catches him out on an impossible bit of American English which Trollope had rashly put into the mouth of Miss Boncassen in The Duke’s Children: ‘I got to be thinking. . .’ Miss Ruby Ruggles in The Way We Live Now, a common girl who aspires to marry a gentleman, is not among his most plausible creations. But within his own range his art is intensely verbal, owing little that matters to movement or gesture. The exceptions there are climactic, and often highly memorable : when a Trollope character moves rather than speaks the emphasis can be momentous. When Lady Lufton yields her son to Lucy Robarts in marriage, in Framley Parsonage,

Lucy slowly turned round her head and looked up into her companion’s face. Though she had as yet no voice to speak of affection, she could fill her eyes with love.

(ch. 46)

A Trollope character who cannot speak is indeed an oddity, and worth remarking on. For the most part, it must be admitted, his account of action is stagey in the most awkward sense. He is a novelist to listen to rather than to watch. One thinks of Lady

Trollope’s Forms of Address 221

Eustace rising fearfully as Lady Linlithgow enters her room in The Eustace Dicimonds, with the oddly literal detailing of her position : ‘Lizzie rose upon her legs, but did not come forward from her chair’ (ch. 6); or John Eames, in the Last Chronicle of Barset, who on being refused in marriage dined alone and, on the way home, ‘stopped in the gloom of a deserted street and, leaning against the rails, burst into tears’ (ch. 80); or Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator walking across the lawn, unannounced, to beard the young peer who, as she tries to believe, has jilted her:

The nearer she drew to him the slower became her pace, and more majestic. Her veil was thmwn back, and her head was raised in the air. She knew these little tricks of deportment and could carry herself like a queen.

(ch. 67)

The scene, as it develops in an exchange between Arabella and Lord Rufford, is masterly. But it is not her little tricks of deportment that make it so. The Trollopian art of texture is overwhelmingly a matter of dialogue.

E. M. Forster once remarked that in his own young days under- graduates walked arm-in-arm and called each other by their surnames : now, however, they never walk arm-in-arm and they call each other by their Christian names. If this kind of observation is among the reasons why Forster abandoned his own fiction, it is among the reasons why Trollope kept his up. Forster was puzzled, almost repelled, by a social world he felt he no longer understood. Trollope, by contrast, was fascinated by shifts of fashion, gaps between generations, and subtle movements within relations between individuals. Language in dialogue signifies inequality, of course, but a shifting inequality where points may at any moment be won or lost. He loves not just variety, but changes in variety. Speech is conferred upon. man to signalize a range of relations, not just a single continuum of respect or blame. What could be more ridiculous, he writes in the conclusion of his North America (1862), than the uniformity of praise by which Americans unvaryingly present all their notabilities and institutions: ‘Sir, what do you think of our Mr. Jefferson Brick? Mr. Jefferson Brick, sir, is one of our most remarkable men,’ or ‘Do you like our institutions, sir?’ Trollope is favourable to patriotism, but never to levelling out: ‘There is something absurd in such a mode of address when it is repeated often’ (11.433). To speak is to make discriminations.

Shifts in language can represent not only changes in relationships but a change in language itself. I t is amusing to watch Trollope take an increasing interest in such matters. The reader watches him grow old. English usage itself is changing, as parents often notice when they listen to their children. ‘There is no occasion for awe,’ the Duke of Oninium replies crushingly to his son, who has thought- lessly remarked ‘I am awfully sorry’. Only the most attentive readers

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of The Duke’s Children will recall, here in the fifty-second chapter of the novel, a more delicate attempt at parental repression much earlier in the book, to which this exchange is a sequel: ‘Gerald and I are so awfully hungry of a morning’, said the son apolo- gising.

And the Duke replies: ‘Well;-it is a very good thing to be hungry . . . I also am hungry, but not awfully hungry’. (ch. 25)

Such are the prizes that Trollope offers to those who attend studiously to his diction. It suggests a linguistic self-consciousness hard to parallel in English fiction in the nineteenth century; perhaps Thackeray, with his imitative passion for the history of words and syntax, is the nearest equivalent. But Thackeray is not primarily a novelist of his own times. Trollope chronicles the Fifties and Sixties so minutely that his interest borders on the lexical. He loves to watch how words and manners change as he writes, and how language defines the age and status of the speaker. If he had lived a little longer, he would have made an ideal research-worker for the greatest of all works of Victorian literary scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary: with a brief, one may imagine, to record shifts in current usage.

The principal differentials in the English system of address are sex, age and rank. That is to put them in ascending order of impor- tance, in all probability, though it would be a question of teasing complexity to unravel how it is that the English play a sort of three- dimensional chess with their modes of address, taking all three factors into simultaneous account. It may be helpful, as a beginning, to suggest in outline how the three differentials work in the novels.

1 . Sex. Man is superior to woman, and is therefore less formal in his address to her than she to him; or he drops his formality sooner. What is more, the husband rather than the wife determines rank. A man can ‘raise a woman to his own rank’, Trollope explains in The American Senator, by marrying her, ‘whereas a woman must accept the level of her husband’ (ch. 30). A woman properly hesitates for longer in reducing the formality of address. When Lucy Moms writes to Frank Greystock, in The Eustace Diamonds, accepting his offer of marriage, even the most formal address is difficult for her, and the use of his first name (though he has already used hers) is a matter only for inward reflection: ‘Dear Mr. Greystock‘-there was matter for her of great consideration before she could even get as far as this; but, after biting her pen for ten minutes, during which she pictured to herself how pleasant it would be to call him Frank when he should have told her to do so, and had found, upon repeated whispered trials, that of all names it was the pleasantest to pronounce, she decided upon refraining from writing it now. (ch. 15)


When Lucinda Roanoke, in the same novel, becomes engaged to Sir Griffin Tewett, whom she does not love, she has to endure being addressed by him as ‘my girl’ (‘Sir Griffin did not do it nicely’); and when she manages to kiss him, murmering ‘You must take me as I am, Sir Griffin,’ he replies ‘Why can’t you drop the Sir? (ch. 42). It is a notable point, earlier in the same book, when Lady Eustace refers to her fiancC, Lord Fawn, as ‘Frederick’: ‘I suppose Frederick will be here todily.’ This is presumably forward of her, since Trollope promptly gives her a touch of his ironic back hand: ‘ “Frederick” came and was received very graciously’ (ch. 10). When he later retreats from his engagement with her, she fires up at his ‘Dear Lizzie’: ‘I will not be addressed, sir, in that way by a man who is treating me as :you are doing’ (ch. 14). Five chapters later they are ‘Lady Eustace’ and ‘Lord Fawn’ to each other. A woman has the right to keep the barriers up or even, on occasion, to re-erect them: to man is reserved the right to make the first move towards taking them down.

Alone among the three differentials, that of sex has ceased to exist since Trollope’s, day. Age and rank are more familiar in their opera- tion.

2. Age. The old are superior to the young, and are less formal in their address to their juniors than to persons of their own age. This is slightly more marked among men than among women: a son is more likely than a daughter to address his father as ‘sir’, a daughter is more likely tlo say ‘father’ or ‘papa’. This represents a slight shift since the days of Jane Austen, where, however, both usages exist for both sons and daughters.

Trollope exercises this differential in referring to his characters in his own voice, as a reminder of their age. He commonly refers to a young man by surname alone, to an older with ‘Mr.’ In The Prime Minister, for example, Mr. Wharton, an elderly gentleman, is contrasted with his son-in-law Lopez-though there the distinction may also reflect the fact that Lopez’s claim to be considered a gentleman is a dubious one: ‘Mr. Wharton and Lopez met every day for the next week‘ (ch. 45) is a representative passage.

A man may occasionally be addressed without formality, even when no longer young, as a survival of some earlier usage. Mr. Camperdown, 1 he lawyer in The Eustace Diamonds, addressing John Eustace on the matter of Lizzie’s diamonds, calls him ‘John’, since he had ‘known Eustace when he was a boy, and had watched him become a man, and hadn’t yet learned to drop the name by which he had called the boy’ (ch. 5). 3 . Rank. The social hierarchy works in its complex but, on the whole, familiar way: in Barchester a bishop is more than a dean, a dean more than a parish-clergyman, and so on; and in the Palliser novels a Duke like Omnium is more than a ‘Mr.’ like Phineas Finn. And any


gentleman counts for more than any non-gentleman. Rank is openly reflected in address. Indeed, in this most important

matter, a man has something more than a conventional duty to the etiquette of the society he inhabits. He has a moral duty to reveal in his manners the status that is properly his. It is a grave charge against him to behave otherwise, and not just on the level of good manners. Rank must reflect itself in manners, otherwise a tragic hurt may be inflicted. When Emily Wharton, in The Prime Minister, refl.ects bitterly on how Lopez has tricked her into marrying him, this is her deeply felt conclusion: ‘the deceit had come from the fact that his manners gave no indication of his character’ (ch. 46). He is merely a facsimile of a gentleman : In a sense he was what is called a gentleman. He knew how to speak, and how to look, how to use a knife and fork, how to dress himself, and how to walk. But he had not the faintest notion of the feelings of a gentleman.

(ch. 58)

This does not mean that Trollope wishes to disjoin etiquette from morality. On the contrary, it is Lopez who has sought to disjoin them. That is why he is a villain. To use a knife and fork properly, and to behave honestly, are in Trollope’s scheme of things genuinely connected. They are reflections of a single ethic. To perform the one without the other, as Lopez does, is to convict oneself of something far worse than hypocrisy; it is the betrayal of a system.

Kinship-terms reflect rank, perhaps a little more sensitively in the mouths of women than of men. Young ladies address their parents as ‘papa’ and ‘mamma’, young women as ‘father’ and ‘mother’.’ Polly Neefit, the breeches-maker’s daughter in Ralph the Heir, who has ladylike aspirations without being a lady, usually calls her father ‘father’ but her mother ‘mamma’. But when they all sit down together to dinner with her gentleman-admirer, Ralph himself, she addresses her father in these mixed terms: ‘Law, papa, what does it matter?’, where a vulgar expletive is instantly rescued (as she hopes) by a refined parental address (ch. 9). This is presumably because Ralph is listening. Indeed, as he soberly considers marrying her to pay his debts, he reflects that he might after all teach her to call her father ‘papa’. Her mother, who is incurably vulgar, addresses her husband as ‘Neefit’ when they are alone and as ‘Mr. Neefit’ when Ralph is there.

Money is not an index of status, and this is an important conclusion if these novels are to be accepted as a mirror of the times. It is no wonder if Trollope always refers to Carlyle and his diatribes against Victorian materialism with contempt. On this evidence-and it does not stand alone-status among the Victorians was not based

‘Cf. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), where Rosamond Vincy addresses her parents, in ladylike fashion, as ‘papa’ and ‘mamma’ (I. l l ) , whereas Mary Garth calls hers ‘mother’ and ‘father’ (111. 25).

Trollope’s Forms of Address 225 on wealth. Omriium is hugely rich, indeed; heis also a Prime Minister; but any attentive reader of the Palliser novels would surely agree that Trollope’s admiration for him is founded not on his wealth, over which the novelist ironizes, or his office, which means so much less than it sounds, but on his rank. He is the supreme English gentleman. Even his title matters less than this. He embodies at once a morality and a life-style, and though that style needs money to sustain it, money cannot guarantee it. Mr. Melmotte in The Way We Live Now is plain evidence for that. The parvenu gets no credit in Trollope, and those why try to buy themselves status fail in the attempt. A gentleman, in any case, may be penniless or in debt, like Ralph; but he is not less a gentleman for that reason, and nobody doubts he would be marrying far beneath him in taking the hand of a rich tradesman’s daughter. Wealth is neither status nor power in Trollope, though it may comically or criminally try to be both. Nor has the split between rich and poor, which Disraeli and M a n proclaimed in varying tones of fear and hope in the 1840s, been realised in the decades that follow. There are no Two Nations in these novels, only gradations. Some people have more money than others.

Nor, to narrow the argument from society to grammar, do pronouns count for anything here. English is a curiosity among the European languages in possessing no tutoiement, no distinction between formal and informal pronouns in the second person singular. This deprivation, which occurred in literary English late in the seventeenth century, could be expressed in mathematical terms, and the diagram could also serve with variations for any dual system of addless, e.g. ‘Smith’ or ‘Mr. Smith’. There are four possibilities in such systems :

A addresses B as vous, 9 , 7, 3 , ,¶ toi, 3 , ,, ,, ,, mi; 9 , 9 , ,> ,7 ” O W 9 , ,, ,, ,, toi; 7, Y , ,, 9 7 to& 7 7 7 , ,, 7, I’OUS.

B addresses A as vow;

The deprivation of the English pronoun-system then, for which no convincing historical explanation has ever been offered, reduces the possibilities as between two individuals from four to one. In more complex situations the simplification is naturally greater still. And if one can imagine a fiction composed in a language which, like certain Asian languages, possesses three or more pronouns in the second-person singular, the simplicity of English in its grammatical aspects begins to look stark. Indeed certain major elements in continental literatures are virtually untranslateable into English as a result.

And yet it is doubtful if any English novelist has ever been conscious of any impoverishment here, least of all Trollope; and doubtful if he need be, when one considers the range of possibilities


provided by forms of address other than pronouns. It is a system at once ample and economical: it can make its points in a single word, even by a silence. Trollope, who insists in his Autobiography that speeches in novels should be short, rarely ‘much above a dozen words at a breath’ (ch. 12), suggests no sense of constriction in his use of inherited forms.

These forms may now be conveniently ranged as a hierarchy, moving downwards from extreme formality to extreme intimacy; with the reminder that, as is common in social hierarchies, the middle rungs are more thickly populated than the two extremes.

(a) (b)

(c) (d) (e) (f)

titles, such as ‘my lord’; formal address, such as ‘Duke’, ‘Sir’, ‘Madam’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Dean’ ; formal address by name, such as ‘Mr. Finn’; neutral address as between equals, such as ‘Smith’; intimate address by first name, such as ‘John’; extreme intimacy, such as ‘my dear’ or nicknames like ‘Griff’ for Sir Griffin, or ‘Planty Pal’ for Omnium.

There are notable areas of significant silence between the rungs, and especially in c/d and d/e, where the absence of forms of address can be a cautious expedient, and sometimes one that envisages a descent towards a lower rung.

Some qualifications need to be entered. Formal addresses such as (a) and (b), where they mark a reversion from some more intimate relationship, may represent terms of warning or contempt. When Lord Rufford in the garden, in The American Senator, politely reproaches Arabella Trefoil for not taking his advice, she replies devastatingly ‘Neither your advice nor your money, my lord’ (a), and she continues to address him aggressively as ‘Lord Rufford’ (blc), while he replies in terse embarrassment without using any term of address at all. In this highly charged scene, Trollope even allows his characters that most marked of all usages, an address in the third person : Rufford: ‘If Miss Trefoil’s frame of mind will allow her to sit at

table with me . . .’ Arabella: ‘Miss Trefoil’s frame of mind will not allow her to eat or

to drink with such a dastard’. (ch. 67)

In the farcical scene near the end of the Last Chronicle, where Madalina and her mother Lady Demolines try to trap John Eames into marriage by Madalina’s fainting into his arms, the old lady’s ‘Sir’ has a similar force (ch. 80).

The neutral address of (d) as between equals may be something very different as between unequals, and especially women : Lady Linlithgow’s address to Lizzie’s companion Miss Macnulty as


‘Macnulty’ in The Eustace Diamondr (ch. 16) suggests an intimidating condescension touched with contempt. And intimate address (e l f ) may be merely habitual as well as affectionate; or it may hover between the two. With Clarissa Underwood, in Rakh the Heir, Ralph was

on terms of such intimacy that she was entitled to regard him as a brother -almost as a brother-if only she were able so to regard him. It was her practice to call him Ralph.

(ch. 3)

One must imagine this subtle hierarchy of address employed against a multiplicity of dramatic situations which permit of infinite variations and ironies.

Characters, as in Jane Austen, sometimes remain at the same level of formality one with another throughout a Trollope novel. Some- times they choose to descend the scale towards informality; sometimes they are nudged into doing so. This is proper from a man to a woman on entering a relationship of love, but it is presumably forward of ILady Mabel to address Lord Silverbridge as ‘Silver- bridge!’ in The Duke’s Children, and to add, when he replies ‘Lady Mabel’, ‘Call me Mabel. At any rate call me Mabel’ (ch. 59). On the other hand, she is a lady of rank, and desperate to marry him. Such nudgings can be directed towards a third person, to mark acceptance alf a newly intimate role. ‘Pray-pray do not call him Mr. Montague’, his bethtothed begs of her relative in the last chapter of The Way We Live Now. Or they can be the result of the inexorable pressure of events. When the Duke of Omnium, at the end of The Duke’s Children, feels himself obliged to accept that Frank Trege,ar must marry his daughter, he moves in distinct stages from (c) to (d) and, in another chapter, from ( d ) to (e) and even (f): Before the dinner was over he made a great effort. ‘Tregear’, he said,-and even that was an effort, for he had never hitherto mentioned the man’s name withoul the formal Mister,-‘Tregear, as this is the fmt time you have sat at my table, let me be old-fashioned, and ask you to drink a glass of wine with me’.

(ch. 74)

At the wedding he accepts his whole duty as father-in-law:

The next morning the Duke asked his guest in a playful tone what was his Christian name. It could hardly be he should not have known, but yet he asked the question. ‘Francis Oliphant’, said Tregear. ‘Those are two Christian names, I suppose, but what do they call you at home? ‘Frank,’ whispered Mary, who was with them. ‘Then I will call you Frank, if you will allow me. The use of Christian names is, I think, pleasant and hardly common enough among us . . .’

(ch. 79)


Trollope’s supreme mastery lies in the shifting situation, of which this is among the most lucid and explicit of examples; and it demon- strates almost too clearly how modes of address can be used to signal such shifts to the reader. This is where his originality lies: no English novelist before him had so fully exploited the drama of scenes where relationships alter by conscious design, as here, or slip by subtle inadvertence, or slide headlong towards intimacy in a manner neither willed nor desired. The most compelling of his scenes are often those in which a character enters a room or a garden intending to effect one kind of dramatic encounter, only to find that the scene evolves beyond his control and, what is more, beyond anything that his most careful meditation could have predicted. The analogy with chess is here at its strongest: the most unskilled player meditates on the contingencies of the game (‘If he moves there, I shall reply with . . .’); the skilled player has ready answers to many contingencies; and yet even the most skilled is still capable of being surprised. The element of such surprise is significantly stronger in Trollope than in Scott, Jane Austen or Dickens. It is a rare conver- sation indeed in Trollope that goes as its participants mean it to go.

All this sets up a highly characteristic intimacy, in Trollope, between novelist and reader. Henry James was scornful of this effect, which he found inartistic and deflatingly cosy; but then James, who was seeking other prizes in his own fiction, may be an unsympathetic witness here. He saw the novelist as a make-believe historian or nothing: ‘It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus stand.’ The plot has already happened, so to speak, and the novelist tells what happened with the fewest possible visible traces of his art. This is not Trollope’s way. He imagines the novelist and reader as onlookers and eavesdroppers of an unfolding spectacle. In Trollope the plot has not already happened : the novelist can even pretend not to know what is going to happen next. ‘The author and reader should move along together,’ he intimates in the course of Barchester Towers, ‘in full confidence with each other’, and the novelist must never try to mystify or dupe the reader (ch. 15). Considered as spectators, novelist and reader are all but equal in knowledge, if not strictly in comprehension. If this requires Trollope on occasion to reveal the plot to the reader in advance of events themselves, he will do even that.

This is why Trollope so rarely condescends to the reader, like Thackeray, or startles him with sudden revelations like Dickens. Nor, at the other extreme, does he assemble a total pattern, like James-a sort of grand tableau of a situation in all its complexities. Journeying through his plots at a steady pace, it is the shifts in relationships that hold the attention. Even the greatest decisions, like a proposal of marriage, can be made (or half-made) unawares. When Ralph speaks words of affection to Clarrisa, in RaIph the


Heir, they fall out of him almost without consideration. This is not, or at least not consciously, why he paid the visit: ‘He had in truth no settled puirpose in his mind . . . He had not come down to Fulham on that evening prepared to make her an offer’ (ch. 7). Two chapters later the same indecisive hero blunders into another such situation, the first being still unresolved: ‘He had not even then made up his mind’ to propose to Polly Neefit, even when he goes to dine at her home with her parents, and he suddenly sees that he may ‘drift into this marriage without any real decision of his own.’ This is not because he has failed to think about the matter, but because he has thought discrganisedly about a variety of possibilities without concluding which he prefers. He is like a committee-man whose vote is not yet tied and who wishes first to hear the arguments. In such matters the momentous and the merely formal are in close harmony. If men can slip in and out of promises of marriage like this, they can certainly slip out of one form of address into another. That does not make the terms of address any less significant: a move in a game can be binding even when it is ill-considered or hardly considered at all. Trollope can see that forms define relations as well as relations forms. A word of endearment or familiarity can slip out unreflected and change everything, for better or worse.

Consider the following exceptionally full example of shift, and presumably unpremeditated shift, in The Prime Minister. It is a scene in which Sexty Parker, Lopez’s vulgar business associate, humiliates him before their wives. Throughout the dinner he addresses Emily as ‘Ma’am’ or ‘Mrs. Lopez’; but his ‘Lopez’ suddenly descends into a ‘Ferdinand’ : A black cloud came over ‘Ferdinand’s’ face, but he said nothing. Emily of a sudden drew herself up, unconsciously-and then at once relaxed her features and smiled. If her husband chose that it should be so, she would make no objection. ‘Upon my honour, Sexty, you are very familiar’, said Mrs. Parker. ‘It’s a way we have in the city’, said Sexty. Sexty knew what he was about. His partner called him Sexty, and why shouldn’t he call his partner Ferdinand ? ‘He’ll call you Emily before long’, said Lopez. ‘When you call my wife Jane I shall-and I’ve no objection in life . . .’

This is the small beginning of Lopez’s long punishment for his shady dealings, a punishment that accumulates upon his head until, in the end, he takes his own life. It illustrates one of Trollope’s obsessive interests : how forms change under the pressure of events. Lopez loses his right to respectful, even neutral address because of his dubious financial involvement. He yields, with massive reluctance, to Parker’s movement from ‘Mr. Lopez’ to ‘Lopez’, and even to ‘Ferdinand’; his invitation to Parker to address his wife as ‘Emily’ is of course sarcastic, an indication that a limit has already been

(Ch. 46.)

230 Critical Quarterly reached and that no further humiliation is to be borne. It would be hard to parallel this scene in any English novelist before Trollope. He loves to watch how manners are squeezed and crushed into new shapes under the weight of circumstance. The curiosity of all this was noted in his own time. R. H. Hutton, the most sympathetic of all his contemporary critics, remarked at Trollope’s death the change that had come over English fiction within the century, from the leisurely world of the Regency to Trollope’s heat and bustle, where all the characters are ‘more or less under pressure’ and where ‘everywhere time is short’. It is a movement from the static to the shifting. In Jane Austen everybody is what he is by the natural force of his own nature and tastes. You hardly see the crush of the world on any one.

But in Trollope the atmosphere of affairs is permanent. The Church or the world, the flesh or the devil, seems always at work to keep men going, and prevent them from being themselves alone.

Characters in Trollope, he concludes, are themselves only ‘so far as the circumstances of the day will allow them to be themselves’.l Perceptive as this is, it underrates the subtle rapidity of Trollopian shift. The status and self-esteem of a Trollope character can alter by the instant under the pressures of personal encounter. He can gain or lose points in a flash.

Henry James was right, at least, in his insistence that Trollope means one to notice the games he plays with language. A generation educated on Joyce and Virginia Woolf will be less likely than James to think this a matter for complaint. ‘. . . I will introduce him to the reader in the present tense as Rector of Bowick’this is how Trollope introduces the chief actor of Dr. Wortle’s School in his first paragraph. Not many nineteenth-century English novelists would allow themselves to refer to the tense of their own verbs: that sort of consciousness is either a belated echo of Fielding and Sterne, or a remarkable prediction of a turn the novel was to take a generation after his death. At one point in Barchester Towers, in a reference so deeply buried that it seems designed as an intelli- gence-test for readers, Trollope even commits an indecent pun on his own surname. But his pride in sophistication, which offended James as something destructively facetious, has after all its proper function. It prompts alertness. Watch carefully, reader (it seems to say), and observe the work the novel is about to do.

aR. H. Hutton, ‘From Jane Austen to Mr. Trollope’, Spectator (16 December 1882); partly reprinted in Anthony Trollope: the CriticaZ Heritage, edited by Donald Smalley (London, 1969) p. 510.

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Trollope's Forms of Address