Trollope’s
undoubted affection for the Irish had a very English hue and might perhaps
explain why the Irish were less enamoured of the English. In The Land leaguers, he refers to the new
American teaching that Irishmen should be masters of their own destiny:
‘Never were a
people less fitted to exercise such dominion without control. Generous, kindly,
impulsive, and docile, they have been willing to follow any recognised leader.’
Writing of the
great famine, the backdrop to Castle
Richmond, he expressed another equally patronising view:
‘One would think
that starving men would become violent, taking food by open theft—feeling, and
perhaps not without some truth, that the agony of their want robbed such
robberies of its sin.’
But, apart from
one incident, the ransacking of a bakery, this didn’t happen. Why?
‘The fault of
the people was apathy. It was the feeling of the multitude that the world and
all that was good in it was passing away from them; that exertion was useless,
and hope hopeless.’
Accurate or otherwise,
the impression given is that Ireland and its people would be bereft without the
leadership and beneficence of its Anglicised landed class and reflects the
limits of Trollope’s vision.
Richmond Castle
is fairly standard Trollope but within the context of the Irish famine. It’s an
interesting but uncomfortable juxtaposition and again hints at uncomfortable
realities beyond Trollope’s vision. Certainly, the Fitzgerald family thought of
the poor, setting up corn mills and establishing soup kitchens, but the
response to their charity was mixed:
‘The hardest
burden which had to be borne by those who exerted themselves at this period was
the ingratitude of the poor for whom they worked;—or rather I should say
thanklessness.’
In fairness,
Trollope both sympathises with and understands the response of the
‘ungrateful’:
‘To call them
ungrateful would imply too deep a reproach, for their convictions were that
they were being ill used by the upper classes. When they received bad meal
which they could not cook, and even in their extreme hunger could hardly eat
half-cooked; when they were desired to leave their cabins and gardens, and
flock into the wretched barracks which were prepared for them; when they saw
their children wasting away under a suddenly altered system of diet, it would
have been unreasonable to expect that they should have been grateful. Grateful
for what?’
But then his
sympathies switch back to those doling out soup:
‘But not the
less was it a hard task for delicate women to work hard, and to feel that all
their work was unappreciated by those whom they so thoroughly commiserated,
whose sufferings they were so anxious to relieve.’
More
chilling is Trollope’s response to the famine in general which he sees as
providential, indeed a blessing in disguise. For Trollope ‘a merciful God’ sent
the famine to rid Ireland of much evil, and that this in time will be
acknowledged:
‘ . . . acknowledged
as it is acknowledged that new cities rise up in splendour from the ashes into
which old cities have been consumed by fire. If this beneficent agency did not
from time to time disencumber our crowded places, we should ever be living in
narrow alleys
‘But very
frightful are the flames as they rush through the chambers of the poor, and
very frightful was the course of that violent remedy which brought Ireland out
of its misfortunes. Those who saw its course, and watched its victims, will not
readily forget what they saw.’
And so, a decade
or two later God’s wisdom and that of Her Majesty’s Government are made manifest.
The wisdom of government action and its abstinence from action has borne fruit
for:
‘ . . . now
again the fields in Ireland are green, and the markets are busy, and money is
chucked to and fro like a weathercock.’
The view exemplifies Victorian certainty:
England the inspired instrument of God, knowing what’s best and settling its
peace on those born to serve. Paternalism allied with destiny had a dark side
both in Ireland and beyond.
Tasmania had suffered systematic
genocide, the last indigenous Tasmanian, William Lanner, dying in 1869 at the
age of 34. Like Dickens, Trollope argued
both in favour of European colonisation and its logical consequence, the
removal of the indigenous people:
‘Of the Australian black man we
may certainly say that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary
suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in the matter.’ Australia and New Zealand 1873.
This is
paternalism with an iron first and seemingly far removed from the idealised
world he depicts in his books; but Trollope was a man of his time and shared
the Victorian concept of racial hierarchy, the replacement of barbarism with
European civilisation as essentially good. It was a view held by most
Victorians, conservative and liberal, and probably shared by those inhabiting
Trollope’s fictional world.
