The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Online Free PDF

surprisingly often, and with approbation, to describe a number of his male characters.
    For all their classical training in the Aristotelian virtues of temperance and fortitude, men cry a great deal in Trollope’s work, copiously at times, and far more than women do. Before and during Grace Crawley’s interview with Archdeacon Grantly, who means to frighten her with all the power of his ecclesiastical wrath, she exhibits the classical virtues of prudence and fortitude: ‘I am no coward, and I will go to him,’ she declares in Chapter 57 , repelling her friend’s ‘feminine’ efforts to tidy her dress and hair. Grace has been carefully trained in the classics at her father’s knee, and is probably better read in Aristotle than the Archdeacon, despite his Oxford education. She remains calm throughout the interview, but he does not: ‘As he looked down upon her face two tears formed themselves in his eyes, andgradually trickled down his old nose.’ Upon hearing of his meeting with Grace, the Archdeacon’s wife feels that if she had been there, ‘a more serene mode of business would have been adopted’ (ch. 58 ). chapter 74 is full of the tears of two men of the world – Major Grantly and the lawyer Mr Toogood – as they inform Mr Crawley and his family that the origin of the cheque has been discovered and that he is completely cleared of blame. At first Mr Crawley is repulsed by the vulgar, familiar tone of the lawyer, but is stopped in his tracks by ‘looking full into Mr Toogood’s face, and seeing that his cousin’s eyes were streaming with tears [he] began to get some insight into the man’s character, and also some very dim insight into the facts which the man intended to communicate to himself ’. Tears, which are usually a sign of feminine sensibility in this period, are here an indication of a man’s character. By the end of this chapter, Mr Toogood has been ‘wiping his eyes with a large red bandana handkerchief ’, the Major has ‘turned his face away, and he also was weeping’, and Mrs Crawley has been sobbing uncontrollably:
    She had been very strong through all her husband’s troubles – very strong in bearing for him what he could not bear for himself, and in fighting on his behalf battles in which he was altogether unable to couch a lance…
    but the good news overpowers her. Mrs Crawley has engaged in the heroic and traditionally male pursuits of ‘fighting battles’ and ‘couching lances’. In this novel many of the ‘stern laws of the world’, including those which dictate what are the ‘natural’ and separate roles of men and women, are evaded, bent, or dismissed: men can be irrational while women remain calm; men and women are both tender and loving with little children, but it is the men we see caring for them; a man can show ‘the tenderness of a woman’ and be somehow the more manly for it. This is most certainly not to imply that Trollope is revolutionary in his approach to those Victorian truths concerning the division of the sexes; when addressing himself to the matter outside his novels he seems to follow the line of Mr Crawley when he famously tells Mrs Proudie, ‘the distaff were more fitting for you’ (ch. 18 ), as is quite evident in a lecture he gave across Britaincalled ‘The Higher Education of Women’ at about the same time that he wrote and published
The Last Chronicle of Barset
.
    â€˜There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip’ was a favourite maxim of Anthony Trollope’s, usually referring to the accidents that can occur between courtship and the legal bond of marriage. The adage can also describe an important aspect of Trollope’s novels which is significant for an understanding of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
; that is, the slippage between the ‘cup’, or the seemingly solid and sacred