Burrowing into Books - "The Last Chronicles of Barset," Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selected Readings

                                                                                                                                        May 24, 2018

“The Last Chronicles of Barset”

Anthony Trollope

“But to me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real city,

 and the spires and towers have been before my eyes,

 and the voices of the people known to my ears,

 and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps.”

                                                                                                Anthony Trollope

                                                                                                The Last Chronicles of Barset

A good friend once suggested that story-tellers, such as Trollope, have an immortality that transcends time and place. The narrative, the creation of the author, replays in the reader’s consciousness, and can be done so long as the tale is allowed to be retrieved. Trollope’s characters and venues, figments of a 19^thCentury imagination, can be visited and discussed, as they file into the consciousness of 21^stCentury readers. “Last Chronicles” was written 152 years ago and Anthony Trollope is buried in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery, yet time and distance do not hinder its immersion into our minds.

As the title makes clear, this is the last of the six books that comprise the Barsetshire novels; the quote above comes from the final paragraph. This is the story of Josiah Crawley, the impoverished perpetual curate of Hogglestock parish. He is accused of a crime he did not commit. Crawley’s memory fails him – he cannot recall the circumstances as to how he came into possession of the questioned twenty pounds. He is also a man of his time, a gentleman who believes in honesty, fortitude and the need to be accountable for one’s actions. Mr. Crawley is indicted, and a trial is set for about four months hence. Loving her husband but in despair, Mrs. Crawley feels he derives a schadenfreude-like pleasure in his own misfortune. “A consciousness of undeserved woe produces a grandeur of its own,” she says to her friend Lucy Roberts. It is a story that pokes fun at the Church of England and displays the contrasts of wealth and poverty that reside perversely (but naturally) within it.

The plot is compounded when the Archdeacon of Barchester Theophilus Grantly’s son, Major Henry Grantly, falls in love with Grace Crawley, oldest daughter of the Crawley’s. Given Victorian standards, she feels she cannot accept him as long as her father is under suspicion. The plot thickens when we learn that the obnoxious Mrs. Proudie, wife of the milquetoast-like Bishop of Barchester, is determined to destroy the implacable Mr. Crawley. “Peace, woman,” Mr. Crawley counters her accusations. Trollope writes, surely with a smile on his face: “The bishop jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman. But he jumped rather in admiration than in anger.”

There are plots within plots and subplots within sublots, as in all Trollope novels, like the unfortunate circumstances of his good friend Reverend Francis Arabin, Dean of the Cathedral at Barchester and his wife traveling abroad, when their witness would ease the travails of Mr. Crawley. We meet again characters we have known from earlier books, like the whimsical and frustrating Lily Dale, the eminent Dr. Thorne and the gentle Septimus Harding, former Warden of Hiram’s Hospital, whose death scene is among the most evocative I have read. “He has no suffering, no pain, no disturbing cause. Nature simply retires to rest.”

We live in a frenetic world, where style is more substantive than substance, where celebrity is celebrated more than character We live at a polarized time when identity politics divide our society and where violence, meanness and foul language permeate our culture. In this environment, a reader could do worse than escape into a Trollope novel, and the “spires and towers” of Barsetshire. Readers can become acquainted (or reacquainted) with “the voices of the people known to my ears.” Reading Trollope provides relief in a troubled and tempestuous time. He offers perspective when moral clarity is clouded by the exhalations of sanctimonious hypocrites, braggarts and nay-sayers.