Trollope and Thirkell's Barsetshires: Neo-Victorian Formalism and Racial Purity

       Formal criticism about Anthony Trollope's series fiction centers on its open-ended nature. Not only are his individual novels reticent about the generic conventions of the Victorian domestic novel, but the Barsetshire Chronicles and the Palliser Novels push formal innovations to an extreme. Ever the willing novelist, Trollope satisfies his readers' desire for marital resolution by deploying what Caroline Devers calls "embryo plots": half-realized plots accumulate only to fall aside as the desired, "natural" plot fulfills itself, achieving at best a contingent, near-Darwinian sense of an ending. Embryo plots, the series reader quickly realizes, stay half-born only so long. Characters pop up in new novels to "realize" plots laid long before. These novels as they delineate the social milieux of clergy, gentry, aristrocracy, and parliamentarians are ever fraught with invasions by other characters, from incursions from other territories. The Barsetshire Chronicle's  Old Duke on Omnium gossips about the Palliser novel's Lady Eustance and her stolen diamonds. Liberal Planty Palliser's Tory nemesis, Mr. Daubeny, sits for Barsetshire. Trollope's series fiction is always permeable.
      Despite wide-spread popularity throughout the '60's and '70's, Trollope's popularity precipirously declined after his death, reaching a nadir during the first world war.
      Enter Angela Thirkell.
      During the interwar period, Trollope's fiction underwent a resurregence. Part of a craze for of "South Counties England" -- the literary embodiments of which also comprise Austen, Hardy, and Shakespeare -- Trollope's series fiction, especially the Barsetshire novels, satisfied a British need for social cohesion under the creeping shadow of Nazism. In the Grantleys, Dales, Pallisers, and Finns of Trollope's fiction Britons found a common heritage, a common identity as strong as any provided by the great bard.
    Or so it would seem. Beginning with 1933's High Tide Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels resurrected the varied geneologies of Trollope's orginal fiction, placing decedents in an every changing Britain. The heirs of Omnium loved and lost across two world wars. The Grantleys steered Christian flocks through war and peace and war again. Thirkell's series is notable, however, not for the repetition of character names, but also for the continuance of constitutive Trollopian formal practices: near-contemporary chronicling and social milieux permeated with a cast of recurring characters.
   One could peg Thirkell as opportunisitc, a literary recyclist intent of quick returns. And of course, the same had been said of Trollope himself -- such a complaint famously drove Trollope to kill off the Barsetshire novel's Mrs. Proudie.
    Instead, Thirkell's recurrence to Trollope's recurring characters is a cagey neo-Victorian formalism. And hers is one with profound inplications for the nature of series fiction. If Trollope's own series novels were porous, and if such permeability was generated by the artfully self-referntial recurrence of characters, then Thirkell's Barset novels are as "authentic" as Trollope's.
   Imagine the reading experience of Thirkell's generation of series readers. Not only would they faithfully wait the latest contemporary installment (a reading practice little different from the Victorians' serial reading practice), but they would while their waiting with Trollope's novels. The oscillations between generations could have created a seemingly coherent history of English culture, a fictional continuity across three generations reassuring to a nation imperiled.
  Of course, Thirkell's expanded series served conservative, nativist desires. The continuity of racial (and class) bloodlines across multiple generations is, to a degree, a more staid version of the racial purity bellowed across the channel.
   

    A personal post seems fitting after such a long hiatus. Since passing my qualifying exam and becoming ABD in early June 2013, I have been working on the first chapter of my dissertation. Focusing on Anthony Trollope's series fiction, I have found myself caught in a bizarre literary-form/lived-experience spiral.
   Trollope's series fiction, like that of nearly every series novelist since (Hardy, Dorothea Richardson, Faulkner), drives readers onwards in a serial prolongation of desire and resolution. Sure, this or that novel ends with this or that generic resolution of the novel, but we want MORE on and on and on. And Trollope gives us that. Novel upon novel, we consume.
     My chapter commenced with the thought: I will write about the multi-novel series of Trollope and Hardy and their intersections with rural government reform between 1850-1890 -- because the scope of that literary archive and its historical span made sense for a chapter. I shelved Hardy after finishing the Wessex Novels. But I became addicted to Trollope. At first I jokingly called my attempts to read the Barsetshire novels by their original part installments my "daily Trollope." Cute, innocent scholarship.
    Eight months later as I wrap up the last of Trollope's Palliser novels, the second of two six-baggy-novel series, some 7,000 pages of mid-Victorian realist bliss, I now must face the truth. Not, "how the f--- do I write about this monster of monstrous novels," but rather, "what the hell happened to the last eight months?"
   Trollope, the series novel, will do this to you. Or at least me. I started my academic career with two series novels: Salinger's Glass novels and Faulkner's Yaknapatopha novels. Faced with the challenge of learning how to be a scholar all over again, I turned to my novel security blanket -- the series. It promised what any fledgling academic writer needs: deferral, delay, the denial of closure. First chapters take a year, we are told. Don't beat yourself up, you've got a year. For me, the series novel offered the literary form of this assurance. I could take longer because I had to read more . . . and more . . . and more.
    But it works out in the end. Because there must be an end to the series. Trollope waxed nostalgic when dropping the curtain on the Barsetshire novels. The Palliser Novel's Duke's Children did the same by embedding that sentiment in the reminiscences of Plantagenet Palliser. And my chapter will be written, but only because I have gone full circle just like the novels I love. I started with the series novel again, and again, and again.
   Like any addiction, it never seems to cease. My next chapter centers on Hardy's Wessex Novels. All of them. As a series.