Book review: Herr Doktor Thorne

By Anthony "Warden" Trollope. And if you've read that, or another, you'll be thoroughly familiar with his style and mannerisms, and his types of characters. And if you enjoyed that, you'll likely like this too; I did.

In HDT, the central theme is how The Young Master can salvage the fortunes of the family ruined by the improvidence and incompetence of The Squire, by marrying Money. However, TYM is in love with a penniless woman - the ward, and nominally the niece, of the titular HDT - and she with him; their heartwarming constancy despite all obstacles will warm the cockles of your heart, and as the book itself does not hide from you, she is going to become wealthy by judicious slaughtering of a couple of parvenus¹.

Our Author, it barely needs to be said, is very much on the side of the gentlefolk, and on the maintenance of Ye Olde Wayes. The unacknowledged contradiction of the book is that YOW are blatantly unfit for the times³. As noted, OA manages to transfer money from the New to the Old, thereby saving his hero and heroine from the terrible fate of having to actually do something useful to earn a living², but I don't think he or his readers could possibly believe that would work as a general plan. Which means the general plan - apart from just running your estates into the ground and being foreclosed - must have been to marry money; and indeed just this happens to one of the spare genteel females as an aside.

Much of the book - that not taken up by the hero and ine mooning and vacillating - turns over the question of status, looking desperately for some acceptable solution, but without finding one. Status, obvs, comes from being gentlefolk - ideally aristocracy, but just respectable-since-time-out-of-mind squire will do. Those who have merely made money, or who have a large income, carry weight: they are not really respectable, but can become so if not too vulgar, or perhaps in the next generation. And signs of honour such as membership of parliament carry some weight too. Our heroine, by these definitions, is not gentle: her birth is at best obscure and in fact common and illegitimate; but because she has been brought up nicely, all her manners and habits are perfectly acceptable; and she can be brought into a polished drawing room without blush. So she is respectable, or not, according to whether it is convenient for her to be so, or not. At points, the book suggests that perhaps if you have lots of money, and a seat in parliament, that is good enough; but then reluctantly discards the idea.

Is there any virtue in this scheme? As presented by the author, there may be: the nice people are nice, and the sort of people you wouldn't mind dining with, and strolling round their extensive mortgaged grounds, except they are mostly intolerably narrow-minded and boring. Whereas the vulgar people say "d---" (obviously they cannot possibly say anything as offensive as "damn" in print in full) and drink themselves to death while dropping their aitches. But this is a thin basis for arranging the rewards of labour. It is stressed that the nice people, or at least some of them, are really very deeply fond of the countryside they are preserving; but this doesn't extend to giving up signs of honour - seats in parliament, a house in London for the season - that their means no longer stretch to. In the end it is all to obvious that it couldn't last.

Notes

1. Don't worry; she doesn't have to get tooled up; they are conveniently obliged to give themselves up to The Demon Drink.

2. Not that there is any obvious sign of either of them having any useful skills, beyond being able to sit a horse and make polite conversation. Laughably, TYM's main idea is "perhaps papa could lend me a farm"; but if papa has a spare farm, why isn't he making money off it? Why would OH make a better farmer than someone who has been doing it since he was old enough to hold a hoe?

3. Why? While our squire is incompetent, not every squire would have been. At a guess, the answer is inflation of living standards: the country as a whole is becoming richer, through manufacture; but the squire's produce off the land is worth no more now than in the past; thus he could continue with rustic oak furniture but if he wants the mahogany and rosewood products of Paris, more money is required. Seats in parliament, once cheap, are now expensive. And so on. Note that HDT was published in 1858 and may be taken to have been set then; the Corn Laws were repealled in 1849 but nothing of so sordid and commercial a nature is mentioned in the book; and Wiki intimates that the strongest effects may have been later.