Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "adam-gopnik"
Anthony Trollope and "The Barsetshire Chronicles"
I am somewhat stunned, as if I were emerging from a long journey, a sort of vacation, and I can’t quite believe that I have accomplished what I had set out to do: I have now read the entire "Chronicles of Barsetshire", chronologically, starting with “The Warden” and finishing, after thousands of pages, with the last glimpse of the inhabitants of Barchester at the conclusion of the “Last Chronicle of Barset”, just as their creator Anthony Trollope had meant the encounter to be. What a journey!
I am deeply indebted to a wonderful essay by Adam Gopnik on the subject of Trollope that had appeared last May in The New Yorker, one that had prompted me to go back to these books, some of which I had read over the years individually but not all and certainly not chronologically. In spite of the essay, I had expected it to be somewhat heavy going and perhaps too large a dose of life among the English clerical classes in the 1860s; I had considered myself among those who, described in the essay, prefer the stand-alone novels of Trollope, such as “The Way We Live Now”. But I was wrong. Perhaps ready for a holiday from modernity, I was caught from the very first pages of “The Warden” in the moral dilemma that its central character Septimus Harding, a decent, mild person, finds himself in; and his slow but steely response to the circumstances. The power-plays of shifting nature, the compromises made or not made in the face of a changing power-structure, (in this case within that of the Church establishment); the life of the rural gentry and its relationship with the Church; the role, as ever, that possession of money or lack of it makes in determining one’s role in society and, most especially, its role in the marriage-market, are so brilliantly presented and so contemporary in some of its aspects that it is extremely easy to translate it into the language of life as it is currently lived. The larger scope of politics is merely in the background in these books, (it is the domain of Trollope's other multi- volume work, the Palliser novels) and London, while it makes appearances, is far away; and yet one gets a thorough sense of the entrenched bureaucracy that the government maintains and relies on. Over the course of the six novels that are the components of the chronicles (“The Warden”, “Barchester Towers”, “Doctor Thorne”, “Framely Parsonage”, “The Small House at Allington”, “The Last Chronicle of Barset”), one gets to know an entire fictional universe, with its complicated and shifting relationships, surprising reverses, enmities and loves, moral dilemmas and love affairs that any such universe will provide. We root for some and laugh at some others, and we are often surprised by the unexpected denouements to our expectations, just as in real life. The very leisureliness of the entire enterprise, the slow pace with which it unfolds, is a perfect antidote to the hectic pace of the 21st century, and yet it is very much akin to “the way we live now”.
I’ve had a wonderful couple of months of being immersed in this universe; thank you Adam Gopnik.
I am deeply indebted to a wonderful essay by Adam Gopnik on the subject of Trollope that had appeared last May in The New Yorker, one that had prompted me to go back to these books, some of which I had read over the years individually but not all and certainly not chronologically. In spite of the essay, I had expected it to be somewhat heavy going and perhaps too large a dose of life among the English clerical classes in the 1860s; I had considered myself among those who, described in the essay, prefer the stand-alone novels of Trollope, such as “The Way We Live Now”. But I was wrong. Perhaps ready for a holiday from modernity, I was caught from the very first pages of “The Warden” in the moral dilemma that its central character Septimus Harding, a decent, mild person, finds himself in; and his slow but steely response to the circumstances. The power-plays of shifting nature, the compromises made or not made in the face of a changing power-structure, (in this case within that of the Church establishment); the life of the rural gentry and its relationship with the Church; the role, as ever, that possession of money or lack of it makes in determining one’s role in society and, most especially, its role in the marriage-market, are so brilliantly presented and so contemporary in some of its aspects that it is extremely easy to translate it into the language of life as it is currently lived. The larger scope of politics is merely in the background in these books, (it is the domain of Trollope's other multi- volume work, the Palliser novels) and London, while it makes appearances, is far away; and yet one gets a thorough sense of the entrenched bureaucracy that the government maintains and relies on. Over the course of the six novels that are the components of the chronicles (“The Warden”, “Barchester Towers”, “Doctor Thorne”, “Framely Parsonage”, “The Small House at Allington”, “The Last Chronicle of Barset”), one gets to know an entire fictional universe, with its complicated and shifting relationships, surprising reverses, enmities and loves, moral dilemmas and love affairs that any such universe will provide. We root for some and laugh at some others, and we are often surprised by the unexpected denouements to our expectations, just as in real life. The very leisureliness of the entire enterprise, the slow pace with which it unfolds, is a perfect antidote to the hectic pace of the 21st century, and yet it is very much akin to “the way we live now”.
I’ve had a wonderful couple of months of being immersed in this universe; thank you Adam Gopnik.
