Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [John Sutherland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785783029
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

Trollopians will find the above passage perplexing. In the episodes of the Barsetshire Chronicles that follow – the multi-volume saga that extends through to the Last Chronicle in 1867 – the Proudies are wholly resident in Barchester: provincial through and through. What happened to the plan of having their main base in London? It is never mentioned again.

In the four chapters that follow we apprehend that the Proudies are making only a fleeting visit to Barchester – some three or four days’ duration, as we are told, during which Slope gives the obnoxiously low-church sermon in the cathedral which sets ‘all Barchester by the ears’. Leaving Slope to fight their reformist battles, the bishop and his wife return to their natural habitat at the end of Chapter 7 (‘Dr and Mrs Proudie at once returned to London … they left Mr Slope behind them’). The next chapter sets up what, in his early conception for the novel, Trollope evidently saw as his main plot-lines. It is entitled ‘The ex-Warden rejoices in his probable Return to the Hospital’, and at the end of the chapter Slope makes his wooer’s visit to Eleanor. Ominously, she is not displeased by his addresses. It leads to some friction between father and daughter. Although he is gratified by the thought of being Warden again, Dr Harding is not overjoyed by the prospect of Mr Slope as son-in-law. All this, of course, is a replay of The Warden, where Harding’s disputed warden-ship and his personal distaste for his daughter’s suitor, John Bold, are the novel’s main plot elements.

There follows, at the beginning of Chapter 9, the ‘impossible’ dating reference: ‘It is now three months since Dr Proudie began his reign.’ I surmise that just before this point the fourteen-month hiatus occurred. When Trollope picked up his manuscript again there was a momentary confusion in his mind in which two schemes for the novel conflicted. In the first of those schemes the Proudies were to be absent in London from August to October – while all the manoeuvring for the wardenship and Eleanor’s hand took place at Barchester, with Slope centre-stage. The Proudies would reappear from the wings in early winter. The second scheme was what we now have as Barchester Towers: with the Proudies prominently and permanently installed at the Palace – meddling indefatigably – during those same August-to-October months. The mark of the temporary confusion, like the jolt of a train as it couples itself to new carriages, is that ‘three months’ anomaly.

The main reason why Trollope did not persist with Barchester Towers in February 1855, dropping it for many months, is because Longman blew very cold on the project. The Warden (first published in January 1855) had not been an immediate sales success although during the course of 1855 it began to attract attention and to build up what was to become a huge popularity with the British reading public. But all this was in the future in February 1855, when the first edition of The Warden was still hanging fire.

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