Having just read the posthumously published An Old Man's Love (1884), I believe I can now claim to have read every single one of Anthony Trollope's forty-seven novels. Who would have guessed, when I encountered The Warden and Barchester Towers back in 1958, that it would have taken fifty-three years to complete the marathon?
I'm glad that I saved An Old Man's Love for last. It's very much a valediction to love and to life.
William Whittlestaff, the "old man," is fifty years in age, which, to my occluded septuagenarian eyes, seems barely beyond adolescence. He falls in love with his ward, Mary Lawrie, who is a generation younger than he. She agrees to marry him, but then her first love, John Gordon, returns from Kimberley, where colonial diamonds have conveniently cured his poverty. Eventually, Whittlestaff ungraciously concedes the bride to the younger man. Self-abnegation does not come easy.
My interest focused on Mary Lawrie, who is so paralyzed by notions of duty and honor that she cannot lift a finger in her own interest. It would be wrong, in her conception (and in Trollope's), for her to imply, however slightly, that her commitment to Whittlestaff ought to be re-assessed. In fact, to avoid becoming the much-dreaded "jilt," she has to argue with herself against her own inclinations. Gordon and Whittlestaff are allowed to be active in working out their interests; Miss Lawrie remains entirely passive and therefore virtuous.
As is always the case in Trollope's novels, courting couples are not allowed to engage in forthright conversation until after matters are settled.
Even after completing the forty-seven novels, I cannot help but marvel at this strange Victorian ethic.
It's unfortunate that Trollope doesn't conclude by granting Whittlestaff an avuncular or grandparental role toward the new couple and their putative children. What would it have hurt him to have imagined a scene in which Whittlestaff, a white-haired gentleman, walks the balmy Barset woods with nine-year-old John and seven-year-old Mary Gordon? No such event takes place, and Whittlestaff therefore retains his gloom right to the end. Charles Dickens, always warm-hearted, would have been more generous.
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