Book review: Framley Parsonage

Framley Parsonage sounds nowadays like one of those children's puppet-shows featuring cure rural mice teaching us homely moral fables. But no: it is a novel by Anthony Trollope teaching us homely moral fables such as if you touch pitch you shall be defiled.

I bought my copy on a recent visit to Berkhamstead, which has a lovely Oxfam bookshop stuffed full of books - as though Berkhamstead itself is losing the habit of reading - though despite my best efforts I found only this slim volume to my taste, and that in part because of the lovely old binding, so much more pleasant to read than a crummy modern paperback. But also because I am conscious that this is, as it proudly proclaims, a world classic.

Wiki has surprisingly little to say about it; it does note that The Literary Gazette of 1861 saw the book as marking the eclipse of Byronism in the literary world, and its replacement by what it called “accurate and faithful portraits of mediocre respectability.

I found it very Jane-Austen-esque. Although it post-dates those by about 50 years, in many ways - from this distance - society has little changed, and the drivers of plots remain money and marriage; and the money comes invariably from inheritance; none of the characters do much in the way of work.

In this case Our Hero, Mark, the young churchman whose early good fortune propels him upwards into higher society than he would naturally mix with, is ensnared by debt by incautiously signing off a bond for £400 due in three months. I at least would have liked to see more of the bond market; it is never really clarified but I think what happens is that the Bad Guy sells - presumably at a discount - this bond onwards, and it is then perhaps multiply resold, inevitably ending up in hard hands. And yet - perhaps reflecting the attitudes of those who would be expected to read the book, who would find this all deeply distasteful - Our Hero never makes any effort to understand this, and seeks no legal advice until far too late, and - madly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot - fails to seize the obvious solution, viz a loan from a bank that he trusts. It is all treated as Pitch, something you recoil from and scrub frantically at, but do not understand.

Apart from that, and some politics (rather archly put into the hands of the gods and the giants, not a phrase I'm familiar with but doubtless doing it like that made some sense at the time) and a bit more churchy stuff than you might get in Austen, all goes in the usual conventional ways, but it is nicely done and I may well read another in the series.