Halperin John - The American senator

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ANTHONY TROLLOPE (181582), the son of a failing London barrister, was brought up an awkward and unhappy youth amidst debt and privation. His mother maintained the family by writing, but Anthonys own first novel did not appear until 1847, when he had at length established a successful Civil Service career in the Post Office, from which he retired in 1867. After a slow start, he achieved fame, with 47 novels and some 16 other books, and sales sometimes topping 100,000. He was acclaimed an unsurpassed portraitist of the lives of the professional and landed classes, especially in his perennially popular Chronicles of Barsetshire (185567), and his six brilliant Palliser novels (186480). His fascinating Autobiography (1883) recounts his successes with an enthusiasm which stems from memories of a miserable youth. Throughout the 1870s he developed new styles of fiction, but was losing critical favour by the time of his death.

JOHN HALPERIN is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Trollope and Politics, Gissing: A Life in Books, C. P. Snow: An Oral Biography, The Life of Jane Austen, Jane Austens Lovers, Novelists in Their Youth, and Eminent Georgians. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JOHN HALPERIN

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Introduction, Note on the Text, Notes, and Select Bibliography

John Halperin 1986

Chronology N. John Hall 1991

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1986

Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Trollope, Anthony, 18151882.

The American senator

(Oxford worlds classics)

Bibliography: p.

1. Halperin, John, 1941 . II. Title.

PR5684.A8 1986 823.8 8525981

ISBN 0192837141

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd.

Reading, Berkshire

I AM grateful to Donald Greene, N. John Hall, Laurence Lerner, Gillian Tindall, Robert Tracy, and H. L. Weatherby for their generous help and advice during preparation of the present volume for publication.

J.H.

In this spirit we Americans and Englishmen go on writing books about each other, sometimes with bitterness enough, but generally with good final results.

The American Senator

IN his Autobiography (1883) Trollope notes that The American Senator (18767) was given its title very much in opposition to my publisher. Bentley feared it was misleading, and in most of his advertisements inserted immediately after the title the disclaimer, The Scene of which Story is laid in England. Trollope began the concluding chapter by remarking that the novel might perhaps have been better called The Chronicle of a Winter at Dillsborough (p. 552). But he had written to Bentley on 7 December 1875: I find that I cannot change the name,which indeed, (The American Senator) I feel to be in itself a good name. I am sure that nobody can give a name to a novel but its author. (See The Letters of Anthony Trollope, 2 vols., ed. N. John Hall [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983], II:673.)

The Autobiography also expresses Trollopes astonishment that the reviewers should have preferred The American Senator and Is He Popenjoy? (18778) to The Prime Minister (18756); he declares here that both novels are very inferior to The Prime Minister. In fact reviewers of The American Senator were far from pleased with itthough Trollope was right in thinking that The Prime Minister was treated more harshly, and with less reason, in the Press.

The novelist says a good deal more in a letter to his indefatigable correspondent Mary Holmes (27 December 1876; see Letters, II:7012). He characterizes the Senator from Mickewa as a thoroughly honest man wishing to do good, and not himself half so absurd as things which he criticizes. Having forgotten, fourteen months after completing the book, the name of his parson Mainwaring, Trollope refers to him here as parson Maulevererand to his anti-heroine Arabella Trefoil as the odious female. He adds:

it is the part of the satirist to be heavy on the classes he satirises;not to deal out impartial justice to the world; but to pick out the evil things. With the parson my idea was not to hold an individual up to scorn but to ridicule the modes of patronage in our church. Lord [Rufford] is what he is, merely as an appendage to the odious female,in whose character I wished to express the depth of my scorn for women who run down [i.e., hunt] husbands,an offence which I do fear is gaining ground in this country [Lawrence Twentymans] early schooldays at Cheltenham with his subsequent somewhat illiterate language were the result of a long-ago-entertained dislike of Dean Close & Cheltenham School.