"The Duke's Children," by Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

“The Duke’s Children,” Anthony Trollope

July 18, 2020

“He had already been driven to acknowledge that these children of his –

thoughtless, reckless, though they seemed to be – still had a will of

their own. In all which, how like they were to their mother.”

                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                The Duke’s Children, 1880

                                                                                                Chapter 61

The story begins with the Duchess of Omnium, Lady Glencora, having just died. She has left her husband the Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, a widow with three children: Lord Silverbridge, Lady Mary and Gerald. They are young people on the verge of adulthood – wealthy, aristocratic, impetuous and independent. We follow the gambling, horses and love affair of the oldest son, the romance of the daughter and the college pranks and sporting adventures of the youngest. Thrown into the mix is a hail of characters, scenes from fox hunting – a favorite sport of the author – and observations on politics and society

Anthony Trollope was prolific. In all, he wrote forty-seven novels. The Duke’s Children completes the sixth volume of the Palliser series. In this, Trollope provides a perspective on mid-late Nineteenth Century life among Britain’s upper classes. “He never wearied,” Henry James wrote in 1888, in a not-very-flattering essay on Anthony Trollope in Partial Portraits, “of the pre-established round of English customs…”

Plantagenet Palliser, now a Duke and former Prime Minister and “not yet fifty,” is one of the wealthiest men in England. He had inherited his title when his uncle, the former Duke of Omnium, died. Palliser has mixed feelings about Britain’s caste system. He is a traditionalist: “To the Duke’s thinking the maintenance of the aristocracy of the country was second only in importance to the maintenance of the Crown.” Tradition affected his attitude toward Silverbridge’s and Mary’s choices of marriage partners. But he is a man of contradictions: He tells the American Isabel Boncassen, Silverbridge’s intended: “There is no greater mistake than to suppose that inferiority of birth is a barrier to success in our country.” This he says while urging his son to seek a marriage partner from among Britain’s nobility.

Trollope describes the Duke as a parent: “A more loving father there was not in England, but nature had made him so undemonstrative that as yet they had hardly known his love.” Silverbridge, when we meet him, is a young man out of Oxford and into gambling “who imagined himself to be anything but extravagant, [so] wondered how the figures could mount up so rapidly.” After a flirtation with Lady Mabel Grex, Silverbridge meets Isabel, daughter of Ezekiel Boncassen a self-made American millionaire and scholar. He falls in love. Eighteen-year-old Lady Mary had fallen in love with Francis Oliphant Tregear while she was on vacation in Switzerland with her parents and while Tregear was traveling in the region. Frank was the son of a gentleman of no financial means. He had been a classmate of Silverbridge’s at Eton and Oxford. It was a romance known to Lady Glencora but not to her husband who, when he hears of it after his wife’s death, disapproves. Lady Mary, however, is a young woman of determination, with a clear understanding of her rights: “Being the child of rich parents she had the right to money. Being a woman, she had a right to a husband. Having been born free she had a right to choose one for herself. Having had a man’s love given to her she had a right to keep it.”

We read of the ups and downs of the two romances, of Silverbridge coming to terms with his turf buddies and Lady Mary’s handling of her father-imposed seclusion. Along the way, we pick up bits of Trollope’s wisdom: On life: “It is so much easier to think of the past than of the future – to remember what has been than to resolve what shall be.” On politics: “The statesman who falls is he who does much, and thus injures many. The statesman who stands the longest is he who does nothing and injures no one.” On diligence: “But for the feeling of self-contentment, which creates happiness – hard work, and hard work alone, can give it to you.” On finances: “Money is the reward of labour.” And on communication: “You have first to realize in your mind the thing to be said, and then the words in which you should say it…” Amen to that.

In the end, the Duke becomes reconciled to the inevitable. Silverbridge marries the beautiful Isabel, and Mary weds her beloved Frank. Left undetermined is the fate of Gerald, who having been tossed out of Cambridge for violating curfew, is now at Oxford.

Anthony Trollope wrote knowingly of his time and environment. The love affair between Silverbridge and Isabel was representative of a then popular trend – daughters of American millionaires marrying titled, but impoverished, Englishmen. Six years before this book was published American Jenny Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the Marquess of Blandford. To read Trollope, and his vignettes on everything – from shooting in Scotland, horse racing at Doncaster, fox hunting near Trumpington Woods to parlors in Mayfair – is to better understand the social history of the time. Turning the last page is to say farewell to friends.