"Phineas Redux" by Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

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Burrowing into Books

“Phineas Redux” by Anthony Trollope

December 30, 2019

“The parliamentary acquaintance looked up at the unparliamentary man with

that mingled disgust and pity which parliamentary gentlemen and ladies always

entertain for those who have not devoted their minds to the constitutional forms of the country.”

                                                                                                            Phineas Redux 1873

                                                                                                            Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

Trollope was a satirist as well as a novelist. Phineas Redux is the fourth in a series of six Palliser novels. Like all his books, these satirical stories poked fun at the aristocracy and the upper-middle class of England’s Victorian age. Whereas the Barsetshire novels targeted the Church of England, the Palliser series focused on Parliament and its members. There are, of course, other vignettes, like fox hunting, a favorite sport of Trollope, and of the social life of the myriad people he portrayed, the pomposity of some, the intrigues of others, and the nastiness and kindness of a few.

After an absence of four years, Phineas Finn returns in this novel[1]. Over differences with his Party regarding Irish tenant land reform, Phineas Finn had resigned his seat in Parliament, returned to Ireland where he had accepted the post of Inspector of Poor Houses in Cork. There he married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Flood Jones. Mary died in childbirth, along with the baby. As this novel begins, Phineas is lured back to the London (and the Parliament) he had missed. “Like the warhorse out at grass, he remembered the sound of battle and the noise of trumpets. After five years spent in the heat and full excitement of London society, life in Ireland was tame to him, and cold and dull.”

Almost a third of Phineas Redux is devoted to the trial of Phineas for the murder of a fellow Parliamentarian, a conniving politician, Mr. Bonteen, with whom he had argued publicly moments before the latter was slain. Finn was arrested. In relating the story of the investigation and trial, the reader gains insight to the role of 19^th Century police, lawyers, courts and the media. We learn of those friends who abandoned him and of the loyal ones who stayed true. The trial ends with Finn’s acquittal. While the trial provides most of the suspense and action, the principal theme is politics. They dominate the story, and Trollope, a self-professed Liberal, reminds us in his words that today’s vitriol is not unique: “Never within the memory of living politicians had political rancor been so sharp…” He could be brutally frank: “A drunkard or a gambler may be weaned from his ways, but not a politician.” His candor extended to those who have left government. “When a man has come to the end of his influence, as the Earl had done, he is as much a nothing in politics as though he had never risen above the quantity.”

A principal issue of the day was the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church, a costly enterprise in Catholic-dominated Ireland, and one urged by William Gladstone. Disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church was, in fact, passed by Parliament in 1869. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, in his 1926 History of England, wrote: “The disestablishment and partial disendowment of the Irish Protestant Church was carried out in a masterly and sympathetic manner by Gladstone, whose position as an enthusiastic Churchman stood him in good stead during the negotiations.” In Trollope’s novels, the role of Gladstone is played by Mr. Gresham. On this subject, unsurprisingly, he is supported by the Irishman Phineas Finn: “…he thought, nay he was sure, that Church and State, as combined institutions, could no longer prevail in this country.” In Trollope’s telling, Mr. Daubeny (who is based on Benjamin Disraeli) tried to seize the issue: “If there must be a bill, would you rather that it should be modeled by us who love the Church, or by those who hate it?” Another national issue that persists throughout the Palliser novels is decimalization, a cause championed by Plantagenet Palliser, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later, after his uncle died, as the Duke of Omnium. The issue must have been important to Trollope, but it did not become law in Britain for a hundred years, in 1971.  

In novels written before the age of film, characters had to be fully drawn. In Trollope, readers know that a principal character in one novel is likely to make at least a cameo appearance in a subsequent one. We watch these people, some marrying and maturing, others not. An advantage in a sequential reading of this series is that the reader comes to know the players – their loves, their losses, their fortunes, their misfortunes. Meeting them again is like a return to a familiar place: the old Duke of Omnium; the rich and beautiful widow Marie Goesler (Madame Max); Lord Chiltern and his wife, the former Violet Effingham; Lady Laura Kennedy, her estranged husband Robert and her father Lord Brentford; Lizzie Eustace and Joseph Emilius; Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Lady Glencora; Gerard Maule and Adelaide Palliser, and the obnoxious Quintus Slide of the People’s Banner. The latter is a reminder that an unprincipled, obsequious, biased press is nothing new: “In the storm of wind in which he rowed it was necessary for him to defend his own conduct.” Repetition, whether in characters or ideas, is a continuing theme of Trollope. In the introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Phineas Redux, University of York (England) Professor John Bowen wrote: “Novelists and politicians both know that if people hear things repeated over and over, they can sometimes be persuaded to think that they are true.”

Phineas Redux is considered one of Trollope’s finest novels. The story ends with Phineas marrying and with Trollope writing of his hero: “Of Phineas, everyone says that of all living men he has been the most fortunate. The present writer shall not think so unless he shall soon turn his hand to some useful task.” Two sentences that give this reader the nudge – not that he needs it – to continue on, to read the penultimate novel in this series, The Prime Minister, a book already packed for our trip to Florida on Friday.

  

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[1] Phineas Finn was published in 1869. During the four years between the two novels, Anthony Trollope ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Parliament. I wrote a review of Phineas Finn on January 14, 2019, which can be accessed on the Websites indicated above.