Abstract
Victorian literature contains many memorable father-son relationships. One thinks, for example, of Meredith’s Harry Richmond and his charismatic father, Richmond Roy, or of Tom Tulliver and his obstinate, proud parent, the miller Tulliver. One recalls the affectionate interchanges between Roger Hamley and Squire Hamley (in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters), between Sam and Tony Weller or Wemmick and his Aged P, and between the heroes of the early Dickens novels and their various surrogate fathers: Pickwick, Brownlow, the Cheeryble brothers. However, one also remembers the various paternal incubi and sham patriarchs in the Dickens novels, not to mention the various revered father-figures who loom largely, and often devastatingly, in the work and lives of Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin and Mill. The implied rebelliousness of the sons of Browning’s Bishop ordering his tomb is carried to a vindictive extreme in Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. ‘A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born’, declares Butler. ‘It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment; when this has been once agreed to, the more complete the separation forever after the better for both.’1 Although Butler presumes to be speaking for the mid-Victorian generation in which he grew up, his defiant attitude links him rather with the first modernists, such as Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, for whom repudiation of the father-figure was seen as a necessity if they were to achieve artistic freedom.
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Notes
The finest study of the importance of interpersonal relations in Trollope (and other Victorian novelists) is J. Hillis Miller’s The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) esp. pp. 93–140.
Trollope, Letters, ed. N. John Hall, 2 vols (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983) ii, 557. The first volume of John Forster s Life of Dickens appeared in late 1871. James R. Kincaid has discerned a ‘Dickensian parallel’ in the structure of Trollope’s Autobiography [‘Trollope’s Fictional Autobiography’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (Dec. 1982) pp. 340–9]. When writing about his father, Trollope might well have considered how other Victorians, e.g. Mill and Dickens, had described their patresfamilias.
Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, ed. Herbert van Thal (London: William Kimber, 1973) pp. 26–7, 98–9, 77.
Michael Sadleir’s largely negative view of the elder Trollope tallies with Thomas Adolphus’s description [Trollope: A Commentary (London: Oxford University Press, 1961 repr.) pp. 51–5, 81, 96–7].
See Vineta and Robert A. Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place ( Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966 ) pp. 159–61;
Trollope, Letters, n, 856–7, 575. P. D. Edwards relates Fred’s life in Anthony Trollope’s Son in Australia: Life and Letters (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1982 ).
Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1978) p. 150; Letters, n, 679, 659.
Arthur A. Adrian, Dickens and the Parent-Child Relationship ( Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984 ) p. 65.
See Dianne Sadoff’s Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982) for an intriguing Freudian perspective on the revenge taken by Dickens against his father in his novels.
Eleanor Rooke, ‘Fathers and Sons in Dickens’, Essays and Studies, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: John Murray, 1951) pp. 56, 69 (‘The subject did not stir his imagination’); Adrian, p. 63. As Mill notes, ‘the children of energetic parents, frequently grow up unenergetic, because they lean on their parents, and the parents are energetic for them’ (Autobiography and Other Writings, p. 23).
Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969 ) p. 49.
Autobiography, pp. 176, 276. See Andrew Wright, Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) esp. pp. 1–12.
See Donald D. Stone, ‘Trollope, Byron, and the Conventionalities’, in The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) esp. pp. 72–3.
See Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope ( Berkeley, Calif University of California Press, 1968 ) p. 231;
George Butte, ‘Ambivalence and Affirmation in The Duke’s Children’, Studies in English Literature, 17 (1977) 709–27;
Lowry Pei, ‘The Duke’s Children: Reflection and Reconciliation’, Modern Language Quarterly, 39 (1978) 284–302.
Two critics who take a darker view of the book’s end are John Halperin, in Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977) e.g. p. 268 (‘If the future of England is to depend in any measure upon the labors of Palliser’s two sons, then The Duke’s Children paints a rather bleak picture of that future’);
James R. Kincaid, in The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) e.g. p. 233.
Elizabeth D. Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983 ) pp. 55–6.
Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) p. 207; Butler, The Way of All Flesh, ch. 69. See Jerome Hamilton Buckleÿs fine chapter on Butler in Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974) pp. 116–39. [Joyce’s account of the artist being his own father echoes, incidentally, Meredith’s comment in The Egoist (ch. 39): ‘the Egoist is the son of Himself. He is likewise the Father.’].
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trs. Constance Garnett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976) p. 65.
Two dogma-ridden studies of father-son relationships in nineteenth-century English literature are Bruce Mazlish’s James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975), and, even worse
Howard R. Wolf’s ‘British Fathers and Sons, 1773–1913: from Filial Submissiveness to Creativity’, The Psychoanalytic Review, 52 (Summer 1965 ) 197–214. For Wolf, the father represents (as he does for Butler) the greatest danger to the son’s creative and psychological health. A more balanced view of the topic is Wendell Stacy Johnson’s Sons and Fathers: The Generation Link in Literature, 1780–1980 ( New York: Peter Lang, 1985 ).
Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trs. Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1981) pp. 231–2; 204. From
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© 1989 John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier
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Stone, D.D. (1989). Prodigals and Prodigies: Trollope’s Notes as a Son and Father. In: Clubbe, J., Meckier, J. (eds) Victorian Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09553-7_3
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