Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope

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I have sometimes wished to see during my lifetime a combined
republication of those tales which are occupied with the fictitious
county of Barsetshire. These would be The Warden, Barchester
Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, and The Last Chronicle
of Barset. But I have hitherto failed. The copyrights are in the
hands of four different persons, including myself, and with one of
the four I have not been able to prevail to act in concert with the
others. [Footnote: Since this was written I have made arrangements
for doing as I have wished, and the first volume of the series will
now very shortly be published.]

In 1867 I made up my mind to take a step in life which was not
unattended with peril, which many would call rash, and which, when
taken, I should be sure at some period to regret. This step was
the resignation of my place in the Post Office. I have described
how it was that I contrived to combine the performance of its duties
with my other avocations in life. I got up always very early; but
even this did not suffice. I worked always on Sundays,--as to which
no scruple of religion made me unhappy,--and not unfrequently I
was driven to work at night. In the winter when hunting was going
on, I had to keep myself very much on the alert. And during the
London season, when I was generally two or three days of the week
in town, I found the official work to be a burden. I had determined
some years previously, after due consideration with my wife, to
abandon the Post Office when I had put by an income equal to the
pension to which I should be entitled if I remained in the department
till I was sixty. That I had now done, and I sighed for liberty.

The exact time chosen, the autumn of 1867, was selected because I
was then about to undertake other literary work in editing a new
magazine,--of which I shall speak very shortly. But in addition to
these reasons there was another, which was, I think, at last the
actuating cause. When Sir Rowland Hill left the Post Office, and
my brother-in-law, Mr. Tilley, became Secretary in his place, I
applied for the vacant office of Under-Secretary. Had I obtained
this I should have given up my hunting, have given up much of my
literary work,--at any rate would have edited no magazine,--and
would have returned to the habit of my youth in going daily to the
General Post Office. There was very much against such a change in
life. The increase of salary would not have amounted to above œ400
a year, and I should have lost much more than that in literary
remuneration. I should have felt bitterly the slavery of attendance
at an office, from which I had then been exempt for five-and-twenty
years. I should, too, have greatly missed the sport which I loved.
But I was attached to the department, had imbued myself with a
thorough love of letters,--I mean the letters which are carried by
the post,--and was anxious for their welfare as though they were
all my own. In short, I wished to continue the connection. I did
not wish, moreover, that any younger officer should again pass over
my head. I believed that I bad been a valuable public servant,
and I will own to a feeling existing at that time that I had not
altogether been well treated. I was probably wrong in this. I had
been allowed to hunt,--and to do as I pleased, and to say what
I liked, and had in that way received my reward. I applied for
the office, but Mr. Scudamore was appointed to it. He no doubt
was possessed of gifts which I did not possess. He understood
the manipulation of money and the use of figures, and was a great
accountant. I think that I might have been more useful in regard
to the labours and wages of the immense body of men employed by
the Post Office. However, Mr. Scudamore was appointed; and I made
up my mind that I would fall back upon my old intention, and leave
the department. I think I allowed two years to pass before I took
the step; and the day on which I sent the letter was to me most
melancholy.

The rule of the service in regard to pensions is very just. A man
shall serve till he is sixty before he is entitled to a pension,--unless
his health fail him. At that age he is entitled to one-sixtieth of
his salary for every year he has served up to forty years. If his
health do fail him so that he is unfit for further work before the
age named, then he may go with a pension amounting to one-sixtieth
for every year he has served. I could not say that my health had
failed me, and therefore I went without any pension. I have since
felt occasionally that it has been supposed that I left the Post
Office under pressure,--because I attended to hunting and to my
literary work rather than to postal matters. As it had for many
years been my ambition to be a thoroughly good servant to the public,
and to give to the public much more than I took in the shape of
salary, this feeling has sometimes annoyed me. And as I am still
a little sore on the subject, and as I would not have it imagined
after my death that I had slighted the public service to which I
belonged, I will venture here to give the reply which was sent to
the letter containing my resignation.

"GENERAL POST OFFICE,
October 9th, 1867.

"Sir,--I have received your letter of the 3d inst., in which you
tender your resignation as Surveyor in the Post Office service, and
state as your reason for this step that you have adopted another
profession, the exigencies of which are so great as to make you
feel you cannot give to the duties of the Post Office that amount
of attention which you consider the Postmaster-General has a right
to expect.

"You have for many years ranked among the most conspicuous members
of the Post Office, which, on several occasions when you have been
employed on large and difficult matters, has reaped much benefit
from the great abilities which you have been able to place at its
disposal; and in mentioning this, I have been especially glad to
record that, notwithstanding the many calls upon your time, you
have never permitted your other avocations to interfere with your
Post Office work, which has been faithfully and indeed energetically
performed." (There was a touch of irony in this word "energetically,"
but still it did not displease me.)

"In accepting your resignation, which he does with much regret,
the Duke of Montrose desires me to convey to you his own sense of
the value of your services, and to state how alive he is to the
loss which will be sustained by the department in which you have
long been an ornament, and where your place will with difficulty
be replaced.

(Signed) "J. TILLEY."

Readers will no doubt think that this is official flummery; and
so in fact it is. I do not at all imagine that I was an ornament
to the Post Office, and have no doubt that the secretaries and
assistant-secretaries very often would have been glad to be rid of
me; but the letter may be taken as evidence that I did not allow
my literary enterprises to interfere with my official work. A man
who takes public money without earning it is to me so odious that
I can find no pardon for him in my heart. I have known many such,
and some who have craved the power to do so. Nothing would annoy
me more than to think that I should even be supposed to have been
among the number.

And so my connection was dissolved with the department to which
I had applied the thirty-three best years of my life;--I must not
say devoted, for devotion implies an entire surrender, and I certainly
had found time for other occupations. It is however absolutely true
that during all those years I had thought very much more about the
Post Office than I had of my literary work, and had given to it a
more unflagging attention. Up to this time I had never been angry,
never felt myself injured or unappreciated in that my literary
efforts were slighted. But I had suffered very much bitterness on
that score in reference to the Post Office; and I had suffered not
only on my own personal behalf, but also and more bitterly when I
could not promise to be done the things which I thought ought to be
done for the benefit of others. That the public in little villages
should be enabled to buy postage stamps; that they should have
their letters delivered free and at an early hour; that pillar
letter-boxes should be put up for them (of which accommodation
in the streets and ways of England I was the originator, having,
however, got the authority for the erection of the first at St.
Heliers in Jersey); that the letter-carriers and sorters should not
be overworked; that they should be adequately paid, and have some
hours to themselves, especially on Sundays; above all, that they
should be made to earn their wages and latterly that they should
not be crushed by what I thought to be the damnable system of
so-called merit;--these were the matters by which I was stirred to
what the secretary was pleased to call energetic performance of my
duties. How I loved, when I was contradicted,--as I was very often
and, no doubt, very properly,--to do instantly as I was bid, and then
to prove that what I was doing was fatuous, dishonest, expensive,
and impracticable! And then there were feuds--such delicious feuds!
I was always an anti-Hillite, acknowledging, indeed, the great thing
which Sir Rowland Hill had done for the country, but believing him
to be entirely unfit to manage men or to arrange labour. It was a
pleasure to me to differ from him on all occasions;--and, looking
back now, I think that in all such differences I was right.

Having so steeped myself, as it were, in postal waters, I could not
go out from them without a regret. I wonder whether I did anything
to improve the style of writing in official reports! I strove to
do so gallantly, never being contented with the language of my own
reports unless it seemed to have been so written as to be pleasant
to be read. I took extreme delight in writing them, not allowing
myself to re-copy them, never having them re-copied by others, but
sending them up with their original blots and erasures,--if blots
and erasures there were. It is hardly manly, I think, that a
man should search after a fine neatness at the expense of so much
waste labour; or that he should not be able to exact from himself
the necessity of writing words in the form in which they should be
read. If a copy be required, let it be taken afterwards,--by hand
or by machine, as may be. But the writer of a letter, if he wish his
words to prevail with the reader, should send them out as written
by himself, by his own hand, with his own marks, his own punctuation,
correct or incorrect, with the evidence upon them that they have
come out from his own mind.

And so the cord was cut, and I was a free man to run about the
world where I would.

A little before the date of my resignation, Mr. James Virtue, the
printer and publisher, had asked me to edit a new magazine for
him, and had offered me a salary of œ1000 a year for the work over
and above what might be due to me for my own contributions. I had
known something of magazines, and did not believe that they were
generally very lucrative. They were, I thought, useful to some
publishers as bringing grist to the mill; but as Mr. Virtue's business
was chiefly that of a printer, in which he was very successful,
this consideration could hardly have had much weight with him. I
very strongly advised him to abandon the project, pointing out to
him that a large expenditure would be necessary to carry on the magazine
In accordance with my views,--that I could not be concerned in it
on any other understanding, and that the chances of an adequate
return to him of his money were very small. He came down to Waltham,
listened to my arguments with great patience, and the told me that
if I would not do the work he would find some other editor.

Upon this I consented to undertake the duty. My terms as to salary
were those which he had himself proposed. The special stipulations
which I demanded were: firstly, that I should put whatever I pleased
into the magazine, or keep whatever I pleased out of it, without
interference; secondly, that I should, from month to month, give
in to him a list of payments to be made to contributors, and that
he should pay them, allowing me to fix the amounts; and, thirdly,
that the arrangement should remain in force, at any rate, for two
years. To all this he made no objection; and during the time that
he and I were thus bound together he not only complied with these
stipulations, but also with every suggestion respecting the magazine
that I made to him. If the use of large capital, combined with wide
liberality and absolute confidence on the part of the proprietor,
and perpetual good humour, would have produced success, our magazine
certainly would have succeeded.

In all such enterprises the name is the first difficulty. There
is the name which has a meaning and the name which has none--of
which two the name that has none is certainly the better, as it
never belies itself. The Liberal may cease to be liberal, or The
Fortnightly, alas! to come out once a fortnight. But The Cornhill
and The Argosy are under any set of circumstances as well adapted
to these names as under any other. Then there is the proprietary
name, or, possibly, the editorial name, which is only amiss because
the publication may change hands. Blackwood's has, indeed, always
remained Blackwood's, and Fraser's, though it has been bought and
sold, still does not sound amiss. Mr. Virtue, fearing the too
attractive qualities of his own name, wished the magazine to be
called Anthony Trollope's. But to this I objected eagerly. There
were then about the town,--still are about the town,--two or three
literary gentlemen, by whom to have had myself editored would
have driven me an exile from my country. After much discussion, we
settled on St. Paul's as the name for our bantling--not as being
in any way new, but as enabling it to fall easily into the ranks
with many others. If we were to make ourselves in any way peculiar,
it was not by our name that we were desirous of doing so.

I do not think that we did make ourselves in any way peculiar,--and
yet there was a great struggle made. On the part of the proprietor,
I may say that money was spent very freely. On my own part, I
may declare that I omitted nothing which I thought might tend to
success. I read all manuscripts sent to me, and endeavoured to judge
impartially. I succeeded in obtaining the services of an excellent
literary corps. During the three years and a half of my editorship
I was assisted by Mr. Goschen, Captain Brackenbury, Edward Dicey,
Percy Fitzgerald, H. A. Layard, Allingham, Leslie Stephen, Mrs.
Lynn Linton, my brother, T. A. Trollope, and his wife, Charles
Lever, E. Arnold, Austin Dobson, R. A. Proctor, Lady Pollock, G.
H. Lewes, C. Mackay, Hardman (of the Times), George Macdonald, W.
R. Greg, Mrs. Oliphant, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Leoni Levi, Dutton
Cook--and others, whose names would make the list too long. It
might have been thought that with such aid the St. Paul's would have
succeeded. I do not think that the failure,--for it did fail,--arose
from bad editing. Perhaps too much editing might have been the
fault. I was too anxious to be good, and did not enough think of
what might be lucrative.

It did fail, for it never paid its way. It reached, if I remember
right, a circulation of nearly 10,000--perhaps on one or two occasions
may have gone beyond that. But the enterprise had been set on foot
on a system too expensive to be made lucrative by anything short of
a very large circulation. Literary merit will hardly set a magazine
afloat, though, when afloat, it will sustain it. Time is wanted--or
the hubbub, and flurry, and excitement created by ubiquitous
sesquipedalian advertisement. Merit and time together may be
effective, but they must be backed by economy and patience.

I think, upon the whole, that publishers themselves have been the
best editors of magazines, when they have been able to give time
and intelligence to the work. Nothing certainly has ever been done
better than Blackwood's. The Cornhill, too, after Thackeray had
left it and before Leslie Stephen had taken it, seemed to be in
quite efficient hands--those hands being the hands of proprietor
and publisher. The proprietor, at any rate, knows what he wants and
what he can afford, and is not so frequently tempted to fall into
that worst of literary quicksands, the publishing of matter not for
the sake of the readers, but for that of the writer. I did not so
sin very often, but often enough to feel that I was a coward. "My
dear friend, my dear friend, this is trash!" It is so hard to speak
thus--but so necessary for an editor! We all remember the thorn
in his pillow of which Thackeray complained. Occasionally I know
that I did give way on behalf of some literary aspirant whose work
did not represent itself to me as being good; and as often as I did
so, I broke my trust to those who employed me. Now, I think that
such editors as Thackeray and myself,--if I may, for the moment, be
allowed to couple men so unequal,--will always be liable to commit
such faults, but that the natures of publishers and proprietors
will be less soft.

Nor do I know why the pages of a magazine should be considered to
be open to any aspirant who thinks that he can write an article,
or why the manager of a magazine should be doomed to read all that
may be sent to him. The object of the proprietor is to produce
a periodical that shall satisfy the public, which he may probably
best do by securing the services of writers of acknowledged ability.

CHAPTER XVI

BEVERLEY

Very early in life, very soon after I had become a clerk in St.
Martin's le Grand, when I was utterly impecunious and beginning
to fall grievously into debt, I was asked by an uncle of mine, who
was himself a clerk in the War Office, what destination I should
like best for my future life. He probably meant to inquire whether
I wished to live married or single, whether to remain in the Post
Office or to leave it, whether I should prefer the town or the
country. I replied that I should like to be a Member of Parliament.
My uncle, who was given to sarcasm, rejoined that, as far a he knew,
few clerks in the Post Office did become Members of Parliament. I
think it was the remembrance of this jeer which stirred me up to
look for a seat as soon as I had made myself capable of holding one
by leaving the public service. My uncle was dead, but if I could
get a seat, the knowledge that I had done so might travel to that
bourne from whence he was not likely to return, and he might there
feel that he had done me wrong.

Independently of this, I have always thought that to sit in the
British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to
every educated Englishman. I do not by this mean to suggest that
every educated Englishman should set before himself a seat in
Parliament as a probable or even a possible career; but that the man
in Parliament has reached a higher position than the man out,--that
to serve one's country without pay is the grandest work that a man
can do,--that of all studies the study of politics is the one in
which a man may make himself most useful to his fellow-creatures,--and
that of all lives, public political lives are capable of the highest
efforts. So thinking,--though I was aware that fifty-three was too
late an age at which to commence a new career,--I resolved with
much hesitation that I would make the attempt. Writing now at an
age beyond sixty, I can say that my political feelings and convictions
have never undergone any change. They are now what they became when
I first began to have political feelings and convictions. Nor do I
find in myself any tendency to modify them as I have found generally
in men as they grow old. I consider myself to be an advanced, but
still a Conservative-Liberal, which I regard not only as a possible,
but as a rational and consistent phase of political existence.
I can, I believe, in a very few words, make known my political
theory; and, as I am anxious that any who know aught of me should
know that, I will endeavour to do so.

It must, I think, be painful to all men to feel inferiority. It should,
I think, be a matter of some pain to all men to feel superiority,
unless when it has been won by their own efforts. We do not
understand the operations of Almighty wisdom, and are, therefore,
unable to tell the causes of the terrible inequalities that
we see--why some, why so many, should have so little to make life
enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not
through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from
a full hand. We acknowledge the hand of God and His wisdom, but
still we are struck with awe and horror at the misery of many of
our brethren. We who have been born to the superior condition,--for,
in this matter, I consider myself to be standing on a platform with
dukes and princes, and all others to whom plenty and education and
liberty have been given,--cannot, I think, look upon the inane,
unintellectual, and tossed-bound life of those who cannot even
feed themselves sufficiently by their sweat, without some feeling
of injustice, some feeling of pain.

This consciousness of wrong has induced in many enthusiastic but
unbalanced minds a desire to set all things right by a proclaimed
equality. In their efforts such men have shown how powerless they
are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator. For the mind of the
thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awestruck
by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.
Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they
shall be all unequal to-morrow. The so-called Conservative, the
conscientious, philanthropic Conservative, seeing this, and being
surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells
himself that it is his duty to preserve them. He thinks that the
preservation of the welfare of the world depends on the maintenance
of those distances between the prince and the peasant by which he
finds himself to be surrounded; and, perhaps, I may add, that the
duty is not unpleasant, as he feels himself to be one of the princes.

But this man, though he sees something, and sees that very clearly,
sees only a little. The divine inequality is apparent to him, but
not the equally divine diminution of that inequality. That such
diminution is taking place on all sides is apparent enough; but it
is apparent to him as an evil, the consummation of which it is his
duty to retard. He cannot prevent it; and, therefore, the society
to which he belongs is, in his eyes, retrograding. He will even,
at times, assist it; and will do so conscientiously, feeling that,
under the gentle pressure supplied by him, and with the drags and
holdfasts which he may add, the movement would be slower than it
would become if subjected to his proclaimed and absolute opponents.
Such, I think, are Conservatives; and I speak of men who, with the
fear of God before their eyes and the love of their neighbours warm
in their hearts, endeavour to do their duty to the best of their
ability.

Using the term which is now common, and which will be best understood,
I will endeavour to explain how the equally conscientious Liberal
is opposed to the Conservative. He is equally aware that these
distances are of divine origin, equally averse to any sudden
disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness; but he
is alive to the fact that these distances are day by day becoming
less, and he regards this continual diminution as a series of
steps towards that human millennium of which he dreams. He is even
willing to help the many to ascend the ladder a little, though he
knows, as they come up towards him, he must go down to meet them.
What is really in his mind is,--I will not say equality, for the
word is offensive, and presents to the imagination of men ideas of
communism, of ruin, and insane democracy,--but a tendency towards
equality. In following that, however, he knows that he must be
hemmed in by safeguards, lest he be tempted to travel too quickly;
and, therefore, he is glad to be accompanied on his way by the
repressive action of a Conservative opponent. Holding such views,
I think I am guilty of no absurdity in calling myself an advanced
Conservative-Liberal. A man who entertains in his mind any
political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition
of his fellows, I regard as a political intriguer, a charlatan,
and a conjurer--as one who thinks that, by a certain amount of wary
wire-pulling, he may raise himself in the estimation of the world.

I am aware that this theory of politics will seem to many to be stilted,
overstrained, and, as the Americans would say, high-faluten. Many
will declare that the majority even of those who call themselves
politicians,--perhaps even of those who take an active
part in politics,--are stirred by no such feelings as these, and
acknowledge no such motives. Men become Tories or Whigs, Liberals
or Conservatives, partly by education,--following their fathers,--partly
by chance, partly as openings come, partly in accordance with the
bent of their minds, but still without any far-fetched reasonings
as to distances and the diminution of distances. No doubt it is
so; and in the battle of politics, as it goes, men are led further
and further away from first causes, till at last a measure is opposed
by one simply because it is advocated by another, and Members of
Parliament swarm into lobbies, following the dictation of their
leaders, and not their own individual judgments. But the principle
is at work throughout. To many, though hardly acknowledged, it is
still apparent. On almost all it has its effect; though there are
the intriguers, the clever conjurers, to whom politics is simply
such a game as is billiards or rackets, only played with greater
results. To the minds that create and lead and sway political
opinion, some such theory is, I think, ever present.

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