The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Online Free PDF Page A

disapproval and to manipulate Lily by indirect means.
    In this scene Mrs Dale inflicts upon her daughter a wound which must be the sharpest she has received since the jilting which willalways mark her. Lily says to her mother that Crosbie has ‘been unhappy’ and the ‘remedy’ he proposes for himself is to marry her because he still loves her. She asks her mother:
    â€˜Do I flatter myself if I allow myself to look at it in that way?’
    Perhaps he thinks he is offering a remedy for your misery.’
    As this was said Lily turned round slowly and looked up into her mother’s
face. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘that is very cruel. I did not think you could be so
cruel. How can you, who believe him to be so selfish, think that?’
    Mrs Dale effectively tells her daughter that the man she still loves may have approached her simply because he feels sorry for her. It is a bitter insult, and one with which Mrs Dale intends to control her daughter, as she knows that Lily’s pride could not bear pity. Her fear that her daughter will be hurt again by Crosbie makes her savage. Trollope explores the pain that can exist in even the most loving of mother–daughter relationships, a bond which was held as almost sacred in this period.
    While one contemporary reviewer from the
Spectator
wrote ‘we must say we think better of Mr Trollope as an artist for making Lily Dale turn out a spinster’, 13 many readers then and now have clamoured for the union of John Eames and Lily. The novelist Margaret Oliphant, writing in 1867, was comically facetious in her review of
The Last Chronicle
, but her views nevertheless spoke for many readers of the time when she proclaimed:
    It is a wilful abandonment of all her natural responsibilities when such a girl writes Old Maid after her name. She has no business to do it; and what is the good of being an author, we should like to know, if a man cannot provide more satisfactorily for his favourite characters? Lily will not like it when she has tried it a little longer. She will find the small house dull, and will miss her natural career; and if she should take to social science or philosophy, whose fault will it be but Mr Trollope’s? 14
    Her ‘natural career’ is of course that of wife and mother, roles which many Victorians regarded as having been determined by God,biology, or both. One of the intriguing aspects of Trollope’s novels is that while he seems to adhere to those dearly held Victorian truths concerning morality and ‘natural’ laws, he often writes against the grain of these truths. Of the prospect of Grace Crawley’s marriage to Major Grantly he writes ‘by the stern laws of the world, the son and the daughter must pay for the offence of the father and the mother’ (Ch. 7 ). But those ‘stern laws’ are despised by Major Grantly, and are eventually dismissed by the plot as unnecessary as Mr Crawley is finally proven innocent. In the case of Lily Dale’s ‘natural career’ as mother, it is odd that Trollope has Lily confide to Grace (albeit with much regret) that ‘the very [village] children have an awful respect for me, and give over playing directly they see me’ (Ch. 16 ), and also avoids any scene in which Lily can play the adoring aunt to her sister Bell’s children. Indeed, in the only scenes involving children in the novel, it is men who are caring for them: Major Grantly comes home to take ‘the perambulator under his own charge for half-an-hour, to the satisfaction of the nurse, of the child, and of himself ’ (Ch. 7 ), and the scenes showing the love of old Mr Harding for his little granddaughter Posy, and their long games of cat’s cradle, are among the most moving in the novel. Mr Harding is probably the most loved of all the Barsetshire characters, and he is loved partly because he has ‘the tenderness of a woman’ – a phrase that Trollope uses