THE PRIME MINISTER Read Online Free PDF Page A

interest inthe politicians, while the
Illustrated London News
found the political parts of the novel the weakest. 18
    On one thing they almost all agreed: it was one of Trollope’s less readable novels – in Edward Fitzgerald’s words, ‘the only dull Novel I have read of Trollope’s’. 19 The
Saturday Review
thought it showed that Trollope lacked ‘an independent invention’. Worst of all, Trollope believed an attackin the
Spectator
to be the work of the literary editor, Richard Holt Hutton, who had long been, in Trollope’s words, ‘inclined to be more than fair to me’. The critic in this case-was in fact not Hutton, but his colleague Meredith Townsend, who came down heavily against the novel’s ‘artistic vulgarity’, and accused the author of an ‘entire failure to perceive what relations are and are not possibleamong English political men’. This review, made worse by his misattribution, was deeply hurtful, and was one of those which ‘seemed to tell me that my work as a novelist shouldbe brought to a close’. 20 What a shame that Trollope should never have known of Tolstoy’s judgement that
The Prime Minister was
‘Excellent’! 21
    Later critics generally prefer the politics to the love story. Yet when H.Oldfield Box came to serialize part of the novel for the BBC Home Service in the 1950s, he chose to omit most of Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser, Phineas Finn and the political action, and entitled his serial ‘Ferdinand Lopez’. It is a characteristic of major works that they are complex and can generate different meanings in different circumstances. Judged by this criterion,
The Prime Minister
is a major work, and is worthy of many readings.
    A NOTE ON THE TEXT
    Trollope wrote
The Prime Minister
from 2 April to 15 September 1874, spending eight weeks of this time in Switzerland with his wife, Rose. Under an agreement of 1 April 1874, Chapman & Hall acquired absolute copyright for £2,500, and Trollope was to deliver the manuscript within twelve months. 1 In fact we find him sendingthe final sheets on 26 February 1875, and reminding Frederic Chapman of the understanding between them: ‘The work is to come out in 8 parts, and each part is to contain 10 chapters. The whole novel comprises 80 chapters. The first part is to appear in October.’ 2 The first book edition was due out in May 1876. As so often Trollope was well ahead of his schedule, but for their part the publisherswere a month late in both the part issue, which ran from November 1875 to June 1876 at five shillings a part, and book publication in four volumes, which seems to have been in the June and not the May. Neither issue was illustrated. The text was not reset for the first book edition, 3 and the novel was never reprinted in its original four-volume form. The first American edition was published byHarper in 1876 in one volume, and in the same year there was a four-volume edition from Tauchnitz, the original agreement having prevented Chapman & Hall from ‘selling the right of republication in Germany to any other firm than diat of Baron Tauchnitz of Leipzig’. 4
    The present edition follows the first-edition text, with obsolete spellings retained except where they may confuse the modern reader.Wherever possible problems in the first-edition text have been solved with reference to the manuscript, which is in theArents Collection in the New York Public Library. I am grateful to the New York Public Library for access to the manuscript. A number of textual matters are mentioned in the Notes. A few minor changes – mainly of punctuation – have been made silently, and the following largerconjectural emendations carried out to passages in which the first edition accurately follows the manuscript:
    p. 11       ‘considered’ has been inserted in ‘apt for work, but considered hardly trustworthy by employers’.
    p. 76      ‘oldest’ has been substituted for ‘old’ in ‘The oldest Mr Roby of all’.
    p. 585