Trollope – Ramblings on my bookshelves

The Struggles of Brown, Jones & Robinson, as the book is properly titled, is one of Trollope’s less well known and even lesser read novels. I don’t know why The Folio Society in their complete Trollope novels series decided to drop ‘The Struggles of’ from the title other than the probable difficulty of fitting all the words into the standard spine layout for the series. That this is a relatively unknown work can be judged by its sporadic printing history and the fact that even The Trollope Society themselves largely dismiss it in a single paragraph write up and that the list of primary characters on that web page fails to mention any of Mr Brown, Mr Jones or Mr Robinson. I mentioned the printing history because it is so odd for a novelist of the stature of Trollope, Longman along with Chapman & Hall both declined the novel and it first appeared in eight monthly parts in The Cornhill Magazine in 1861/2. Despite being written in 1857 it didn’t appear as a book until American publisher Harper’s Library issued a copy in 1862, the first British edition was Smith, Elder’s (who also published The Cornhill Magazine) copy in 1870, there then followed another American edition in 1882 and then nothing for ninety nine years!

It largely seems to have been reprinted since 1981 as part of sets of complete works with no publisher judging it sufficiently commercial to make it a stand alone book in its own right. Indeed even The Folio Society, whose copy I have, left it to the last to be printed of the forty seven Trollope novels in their complete set which they started in 1989 with ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ and finally finished in 1999 with this book and then topped off the collection with Trollope’s autobiography. There isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for the novel. With all that in mind it was with some trepidation that I decided to see if it was really that bad.

Happily the answer is no, and whilst it isn’t a great novel I definitely enjoyed it both as a satire of the advertising industry and a tale of intertwined relationships. To set the scene Mr Brown becomes a widower at the start of the book and gains control of his wife’s butter business which he has no interest in so subsequently sells. He has two daughters Sarah Jane who had married Mr Jones and Maryanne who is single but has promised marriage to Mr Brisket, the butcher. Mr Robinson has fallen in love with the flighty Maryanne to the extreme annoyance of the much larger butcher who several times threatens him with violence if he doesn’t stay away from her. Oddly the three title characters subsequently start a business together selling haberdashery which none of them know anything about, with Brown putting up the money, Jones being the floor manager and Robinson in charge of advertising, he also takes charge of the decor and uniforms in the shop which is themed around the recently invented colour, magenta. The original capital in the business is stated as £4,000, which is the equivalent of around £365,000 today, a massive sum to start a small business with, but right from the off the partners, encouraged by Robinson, planned big with significant premises at 81 Bishopsgate Street and a significant amount of staff to match. What they didn’t have was much stock as Robinson was convinced that spending a lot on advertising would bring people in and then you could sell them what you had, rather than what you had promised you had.

It is not only Robinson’s extremely expensive advertising ploys, which range from horse riding knights in armour, to liverymen handing out leaflets but Jones’s dodgy selling which involved putting high quality items in the windows with low prices then actually selling similar looking but lower quality items to the customers for the same price which leads to the reputation of the business starting to fall away. Brown meanwhile is still dealing badly with his two daughters who see their inheritance frittered away in the business whilst he banks less than the actual takings and salts some away from himself. It’s difficult to find a single likeable character in the book with the possible exception of Robinson who is more naive than criminal, Brown’s two daughters are truly horrible and I rejoiced when Maryanne, after playing Brisket and Robinson off one another throughout the book ends up with neither of them and both count themselves lucky to be rid of her.The firm needless to say burns through the large amount of capital it started with in about a year and goes bust, a story that could be applied to numerous businesses that have more ideas than plans or solid foundations. It would have been interesting to see what Trollope would have made of the various overinflated dotcom and IT companies and dodgy banks built on loans to them over the last twenty years but ‘The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson’ is an excellent primer on dubious companies living well beyond their means but believed to be sound right up until they crash. It may not ever have been rated highly but it should be read by anyone looking to start, or invest, in a company in the present day.

The forty eight Trollope books in the complete works set by the Folio Society.

Twenty years or so ago I collected all forty seven novels plus the autobiography of Anthony Trollope in the lovely edition printed by the Folio Society which was the first ever complete edition to be illustrated. These are now long out of print but can still be obtained easily on the second hand market. I admit to having bought them far faster than I have ended up reading them in order to complete the set at the time. I have now read over half but have decided for the purpose of this blog to tackle his final work of fiction, completed before he died in 1882. He was still working on The Landleaguers which was published as an unfinished work in 1893 oddly before An Old Man’s Love which didn’t actually get published until 1894. Both of these are amongst his less well known works, indeed I cannot find an edition of An Old Man’s Love currently in print. Trollope suffered a decline in popularity towards the end of his life and it took sixty or seventy years before his reputation as a great Victorian novelist was restored but even so only about half of his novels are read to any extent today.

20190611 An Old Man's Love

The vast majority of An Old Man’s Love is written as as you would expect although there are passages where the author is talking directly to the reader and Trollope can get quite chatty as in the opening paragraph to the third chapter when we are properly introduced to The Old Man’s love interest.

There is nothing more difficult in the writing of a story than to describe adequately the person of a hero or a heroine, so as to place before the mind of the reader any clear picture of him or her who is described. A courtship is harder still—so hard that we may say generally that it is impossible. Southey’s Lodore is supposed to have been effective; but let any one with the words in his memory stand beside the waterfall and say whether it is such as the words have painted it. It rushes and it foams, as described by the poet, much more violently than does the real water; and so does everything described, unless in the hands of a wonderful master. But I have clear images on my brain of the characters of the persons introduced. I know with fair accuracy what was intended by the character as given of Amelia Booth, of Clarissa, of Di Vernon, and of Maggie Tulliver. But as their persons have not been drawn with the pencil for me by the artists who themselves created them, I have no conception how they looked. Of Thackeray’s Beatrix I have a vivid idea, because she was drawn for him by an artist under his own eye. I have now to describe Mary Lawrie, but have no artist who will take the trouble to learn my thoughts and to reproduce them. Consequently I fear that no true idea of the young lady can be conveyed to the reader; and that I must leave him to entertain such a notion of her carriage and demeanour as must come to him at the end from the reading of the whole book.

But the attempt must be made, if only for fashion sake, so that no adventitious help may be wanting to him, or more probably to her, who may care to form for herself a personification of Mary Lawrie.

And so he continues to give a basic description of the young lady who finds herself an orphan and is taken in to the home of Mr Whittlestaff, initially as an act of kindness because he was a friend of the family and she had nowhere else to go. At the start of the book Mr Whittlestaff is fifty and Miss Lawrie is twenty five although we quickly leap about a year and a half to two years so that she is well settled in the house and Mr Whittlestaff decides to ask her to marry him. Now this she is willing to do, although in truth she loves another, a certain John Gordon who vanished from her life three years earlier without actually declaring his love for her but promising to one day return. Then, on the very day that she agrees to her engagement to William Whittlestaff, John Gordon does come back and arrives at Croker’s Hall intending now that he has made money in South Africa to ask her to marry him.

All this has occurred in the first forty or so pages of the book and so the stage is set for the rivalry between the two men for the hand of Miss Mary Lawrie which is to be played out in the grounds of Victorian manners. Some of the characters favour her becoming Mrs Whittlestaff and yet more favour Mrs Gordon and none are shy about coming forward with their opinion even in front of the three main characters. There are numerous twists and turns before the final conclusion and there is also a sub-plot concerning the housekeeper at Croker’s Hall and her drunken husband which also needs to be resolved in the 172 pages so there is a lot going on considering the relative shortness of this book in the grand scheme of Victorian novels.

Romance is not normally a genre that I would choose to read but I definitely enjoyed this story and whilst Trollope is clearly not at the height of his powers as he was in The Chronicles of Barchester books or the Palliser series, both of which consist of six novels each, it is well written and draws you into the tale of the love triangle.