Anthony Trollope's

The Small House at Allington

Presented to the Trollopians at the Century Association

New York City

January 30, 2008

Pamela McCorduck

When George Newlin first suggested that I make a presentation to you on The Small House at Allington, I was struck by how many of Anthony Trollope's novels are named for structures: Orley Farm, Barchester Towers, Framley Parsonage, and on and on. Then I did an actual count, and discovered that less than a quarter of them have such titles. I was responding, I realize, to the concreteness of Trollope's writing, the palpable sense we have of being someplace real, definite, a place we could probably find our way around, using the little maps in most of the novels, or by asking directions from friendly locals.

 This sense of place is one of Trollope's great strengths as a novelist, although we understand that it's a subordinate strength: it serves as a setting for beautifully realized characters who will encounter each other and act out human behavior that we instantly recognize more than a century and a half later. We can climb those stiles, walk those country lanes, settle down beside the fire in country comfort or ride the train to the bewitching city called London, with all its lures and marvels.

 What isn't so evident in The Small House at Allington—though it is in some of his other novels—is the greater world. The London we visit in the company of Trollope's characters in The Small House, or the countryside where we make sociable visits, is an abstraction, a quite deliberate abstraction. It leaves things out. Why this is so I propose to explore a little with you tonight. Eventually, I hope, I'll persuade you all over again that, as a sensitive observer of human psychology, and of the world, Anthony Trollope was as good as they come. 

 First, let's look at the real outside world that surrounds this novel. Most critics place the novel in the year 1861, which is reasonable, given what we know. These were interesting times in every way.

 A year and a half earlier, in late 1859, Darwin had published his Origin of Species. Explosive then; explosive now: a major scientific and cultural shock, calling into question the very foundations of religious belief.

 Moreover, this book's characters stand sixty years into the beginning of one of the most radical economic changes in human history. If you were to plot the graph, the sum of human wealth, flat for millennia, suddenly makes an upward, almost vertical turn at the start of the 19^th century. A division opens between the rich nations and the poor nations, and Trollope's England is one of the rich nations, the richest then, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, and its astonishing rise in efficiencies of production. After the Napoleonic Wars, wealth can be diverted from warfare to manufacturing: for example, the new Bessemer process for mass production of high-grade steel cheaply and reliably has an immediate effect on ship building, bridge building, railway rolling stock. The first transatlantic cable has just been laid, allowing fast—well, relatively fast—communication between America and Great Britain.

 An American invention, the mechanical reaper, has made its way to England in the 1850s, and will upend the system we still see here in The Small House, of wealthy landowners who live on the rents paid by their tenant farmers. The mechanical reaper halves the cost of wheat, a boon for bread-eaters in the city, but devastating for agricultural workers and their landlords, the landed gentry. This is also the moment when we begin to pump massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because it's when we first use fossil fuels—coal, and then petroleum—on an industrial scale.

 The London of 1861 is a city of great contrasts, dazzling and grinding. In 1858, Parliament has been driven into recess by what's known as The Big Stink: the Thames is so clogged with raw sewage that, even with special draperies dipped in lime, the smell assaults and overcomes the distinguished members. When the Big Stink abates enough so that Parliament can reconvene, it commissions for London the most up-to-date sewage treatment in the world, a system more or less in place by 1865. The new sewer system ends threats of further Big Stinks, but its most dramatic effect is upon public health.

 It's a boom time. Everyone's standard of living is rising (except for poor Mrs. Dale). Of course the rich are doing better than the poor, but the term "middle class" has just come into use in the decade prior to our novel, and that middle class is catered to by a bazaar of luxuries that come from all over the Empire.

 The Empire, a quarter of the globe, and in 1861 only approaching its peak. At the London docks, goods arrive by the ton, but the Empire also offers employment for thousands of otherwise unemployable younger sons; gives poor boys opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have; it's an escape, voluntary or involuntary, for those who need an escape. Meanwhile, the Empire stuffs the treasuries of firms and government alike. In The Small House, we hear of the Empire when Bernard Dale, rejected as a suitor by his cousin Bell, Lily's sister, decides to go to what the gardener, Hopkins, calls "The Hingies," which might be India, and might be the West Indies.

 The Dales, mother and daughters, are only poor in a relative way. They have at least one servant, and a pleasant place to live, that Small House (though they live there thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Dale's brother-in-law, the Squire) and some, though not much, disposable income. The three of them live on three hundred a year—no wonder Adolphus Crosbie's eight hundred per annum looks so princely. ¹ We see Mrs. Dale doing the kinds of wardrobe maintenance that only poor but genteel women must do. Really poor women don't bother. 

For the poor suffer mightily in the England of this time, particularly in London. Despite the growth of private wealth, the farfetched notion of government responsibility to alleviate poverty is only a gleam in the eye of certain Continental radicals. The Lancet says that more than 6,000 brothels exist in London, staffed largely by poor girls with no alternative. Amelia Roper escapes this fate by the skin of her teeth. 

 Medicine, and its sister, hygiene, are primitive. Dr. Crofts, Bell's sweetheart, must have read an editorial in The Times which says that having medical students actually take exams is a waste of time, since diagnoses are a matter of good guesswork, and no one has ever devised an exam to test intuition. In our particular year of 1861, Florence Nightingale establishes in London the first school for nursing—ever. But it's a good sewer system, not medicine, that makes the dramatic difference in public health.

 A literary footnote: In 1861, a young architect's assistant by the name of Thomas Hardy is just leaving the provincial town of Dorchester to try his luck as an architect in London.

 In short, The Small House at Allington is set in a historically charged moment. Profound changes are already underway; more profound changes will follow. All this seems largely absent from the novel, an absence worth pondering.

 The great engine that drives the Trollopian novel is money. Money, the getting of it; money, the losing of it; money that buys not just the creature comforts, but that buys status and security.

 So in this book, the plot is set in motion when Adolphus Crosbie falls in love with penniless Lily Dale. He hears from his good friend, Lily's cousin Bernard (who indeed has introduced Adolphus into the Dale household) that Lily's uncle (Bernard's also) will surely settle something on her, and so proposes. Lily, having fallen wildly in love, says yes. All this occurs within a month.

 Life in the small house has seen some struggle, so at one level Lily's aware that money makes the world go round. Crosbie's annual income of £800 must seem just one more marvel about him. He even looks as if he'll make something of himself, being the up and coming civil servant and young man of fashion that he is in London. 

 But Lily's uncle refuses to settle money on her. Crosbie has a dark night of the soul—in fact, several dark nights of the soul--as he considers what he must now give up to keep his betrothal pledge. He leaves Allington for Courcy Castle, where he promptly gets himself engaged simultaneously to Lady Alexandrina de Courcy, whose sell-by date has come and gone. Lady Alexandrina doesn't have any money either, but she has status as the daughter of an earl, and Crosbie imagines that this status will propel his career.

 When Lily learns of his duplicity, she doesn't think good riddance to thoroughly bad rubbish, but forbids anyone to say a harsh word about him. She dedicates herself to a perfervid and impossible love whose martyrdom has perplexed many a reader. On the day of Crosbie's wedding to Lady Alexandrina, Lily recites aloud to her horrified mother and sister what he must be doing hour by hour—there at the church, the altar, the wedding feast, the wedding journey: all a kind of mortification that gives the reader shivers.  Crosbie is nothing less than Lily's demon lover, and more about that in a moment. (This is such a rich novel that I must resist exploring the meaning of Lily Dale's name, or that Lily's story is a retelling of the Daphne myth, not tonight!)

The question arises—actually George Newlin raised it with me—whether the relationship between Lily and Crosbie is in fact consummated, and if it is, whether this accounts for Lily's morbid attachment to Crosbie long after she should have turned her back. The novel is deliciously, playfully ambiguous about such a consummation, for Anthony Trollope knew his Victorian reader, and knew just how far he might go. Here's a sample of some of that playfulness, using croquet as a metaphor. We know that Mr. Crosbie isn't quite as clumsy a croquet player as he first pretends, but the metaphor takes on more and more meanings—'"Apollo can't get through the hoops," Lily said afterwards to her sister; "but then how gracefully he fails to do it!" Lily, however, had been beaten, and may therefore be excused for a little spite against her partner. But it so turned out that before Mr. Crosbie took his final departure from Allington, he could get through the hoops; and Lily, though she was still queen of the croquet ground, had to acknowledge a male sovereign in that dominion.' I don't need to remind you that women wore enormous hoop skirts at this time.          

Once alert to the possibility, you begin to see more literal allusions to it:  "I think there is nothing in the world so pretty as the conscious little tricks of love played off by a girl towards the man she loves, when she has made up her mind boldly that all the world may know that she has given herself away to him. I am not sure that Crosbie liked it all as much as he should have done. The bold assurance of her love when they two were alone together he did like." Again, "…And Crosbie went away with Lily into the field where they had first learned to know each other in those haymaking days." When Lily recognizes that her uncle will give them no financial help, she offers to break the engagement off. "Though I have given myself to you as your wife, I can bear to be divorced from you now—now."  And still later: "Yes, your own, to take when you please and as much your own in one way as the other." So—persuasive, but of course not a certainty. 

Now Lily is also adored from afar by a local boy who himself has gone to London to make good, a clerk called Johnny Eames. Johnny is in an odd spot too because in his London boarding house, he has begun, or been bullied into, a flirtation with his landlady's daughter, Amelia Roper. (Trollope doesn't succumb to the cartoonish names of his contemporary, Charles Dickens, but he has his fun.) Johnny has written a compromising note which the calculating Amelia often reminds him of, for she considers herself engaged to him, while he can only think he'd rather go to the colonies than marry Amelia—another small sign that a world exists outside.

 In short, the usual Trollopian structure obtains in this novel: the parallel love affairs, the comparisons we are left to make among them; the question of how it will all resolve itself; the ever-vexing problem of money. Those who have money do not wish to part from it; those who do not have it need it--and find it mighty elusive.

 As you read The Small House, you must be struck by the fact that while Trollope lavishes detailed descriptions upon the Great House at Allington, even down to the windowpanes (and equally as much description upon the new and thoroughly awful house Crosbie and his bride Lady Alexandrina occupy after their wedding) the small house is left oddly vague. We know there's a fertile garden, and we know there's a fine lawn, where, when the story has barely begun, the young couples play croquet, and where, a bit later, a country dance is staged. We know that the small house has windows, where the occupants can gaze out and others can look in.

 Why is Trollope quiet here? Can it be that the small house is as much a state of mind as a real place? If this is so, what state of mind does it represent?

 When Squire Dale, uncle to Lily and Bell, and uncle also to Bernard, takes it badly that Bell will not have Bernard, preferring instead a country doctor, the three inhabitants of the small house understand that Squire Dale wants the privileges and authority of a father without the responsibilities.  They agree to give up the small house, a leave-taking that wrenches each of them, the Squire included.

 What are they leaving? It isn't just the home they have kept together for nearly fifteen years, comfortable, friendly, and not incidentally, rent-free. I sense that the Small House could be a state of mind, the golden home of childhood before adult responsibilities press down, before the outside world makes its demands. With its cozy warmth, its gardens, the Small House is an Eden, though more for the daughters than the mother. It might even stand for that sentimental Anglo-Saxon preference for the country over the city, quiet comforts over the hubbub, and even the risks, of the great outside.

 It might stand, in other words, for the place we must leave as we mature, as we make the transition from childhood to adulthood, a persistent theme in this novel, particularly with Johnny Eames's eventual shedding of his hobbledehoyhood, his boy in a man's body becoming at last a man altogether.

 Bell accepts Dr. Crofts as her husband, and so leaves the small house at the appropriate time. But Lily and her mother do not leave the small house after all. For Lily it seems a strange choice. If the Small House is the state of mind I've suggested, then it seems Lily is refusing to step out of girlhood and out of her puzzling, quite disproportionate infatuation—I said martyrdom a moment ago—with a man who has betrayed her, a man unworthy of such devotion. She refuses the man who loves her truly; in a later novel, The Last Chronicle of Barset, she will even turn down the man she has martyred herself for, Adolphus, Apollo, the rascal who betrayed her, by then widowed and all too aware of his error. It seems she prefers to linger instead in the small house of girlhood, refusing, perhaps afraid, to engage with the greater world outside, which is to say, adulthood.

 Maybe this is why the outside world and its dramatic events are so shadowy in this novel. Yes, of course, artistic economy pushes all this into the background, but I also think it works symbolically.

 Poor Lily. She's certainly had bad luck with men and hasn't much reason to trust them. We learn she's about four when her father dies, plunging the family not only into deep grief, but simultaneously into want. Lily is taken to live in a home provided by her uncle who can barely be civil to his sister-in-law, Lily's mother; though in his gruff way, he's fond of his nieces, and gives them gifts from time to time. Her cousin Bernard, who should surely have known his friend better, permits the fatal engagement to take place without a word of warning. Johnny is more or less true to her, but he's a man, and has more than a few serious flirtations with other women, which Lily will hear about, and in the subsequent novel, use as an excuse to keep from marrying him. But Lily's greatest betrayer is Adolphus Crosbie, her demon-lover, an attachment that pitches her toward destruction. Between the early grief over her father's death, Crosbie's cruel betrayal, and then grief for her own shattered hopes, we can't wonder if Lily immures herself in the small house, whatever it stands for.

Still, Lily is no moping drama queen. Her banter is ever bright and funny; she's very good company and much welcomed for that wherever she goes. She tries to keep her sorrows to herself, but sorrows they are, deep and mysterious. We, the readers, know about them; her mother also knows; she confides in a close friend. Meanwhile, all the world presses her to take John Eames as her husband. 

Yet Lily Dale persists in attaching herself, at least symbolically, to a man who has done grave damage to her; continues to claim she loves him. After their brief month's acquaintance and courtship, which ends in their engagement, she sends him ardent love letters; he barely bothers to reply. What kind of love is this? Is he just not that into her, as a later generation will say? But as we know, he does love her. He simply has other priorities. 

From a common-sense perspective, Lily's behavior is inexplicable, nor can we account for the novel's popularity. So let's consider a psychological perspective instead.  

Freudians have declared unambiguously that Lily is afraid of sexual love. Frankly, this is implausible. Her behavior with Crosbie when they're engaged is more than flirtatious; within the bounds of propriety, it's quite sexual. You've heard some evidence that it goes beyond the bounds of propriety. Had the marriage taken place, we can believe that she'd have been an ardent and happy wife.

Meanwhile, she keeps turning down Johnny Eames's proposals. Maybe she refuses him at first because in some ways he is what the Jungians call her shadow: he represents what she likes least in herself, a child--or at least an adolescent--in a grownup's body. But then Johnny comes to her again, as a man in a man's body, and still she refuses him. The reasons she gives are almost morbid—she feels herself as married to Adolphus Crosbie as if she had actually wed him, even though he has married another and wickedly humiliated her to do so. (In an odd parallel, Johnny Eames uses almost the same phrase to describe his relationship with Lily—he feels himself as good as married to her, even though she refuses him and there's no sign at all that any relationship was ever consummated between them.) When, in The Last Chronicle, the possibility of marriage to Adolphus is raised, Lily confesses to a friend: "I love him, but I do not trust his love." 

Is Lily's behavior a tardy example of Continental Romanticism? In The Sorrows of Young Werther, published nearly a century earlier, its hero commits suicide from unrequited love, and some 2000 suicides all over Europe are said to have been committed in sympathy. Lily seems to be committing a kind of suicide.

Or, is Lily one of those nice girls who just finds bad boys irresistible? This to the consternation, the frustration, of nice boys everywhere?

Or, can it be that Adolphus Crosbie stands as an emissary from the outside world—really, the first from that outside world that Lily has ever met, living, as she has, only among the relatives and friends of Allington? Can it be that Crosbie's reprehensible behavior has convinced her to have nothing to do with that outside world ever again? Hence her permanent retreat to the Small House? 

Or, is Crosbie Lily's demon lover? In psychological terms, this phrase stands for an erotic struggle that can and often does destroy a woman—the near fatal union between a maid and a demon, which echoes through classical and European folklore. Bluebeard is the canonical example; some versions of Don Juan; several lives of the saints. The demon lover seduces and then destroys. But if a woman survives and triumphs in that struggle, she will make herself whole, seize genuine autonomy.

Very early in the novel, we have a possible foreshadowing of Lily's future. Mrs. Dale, a widow of fifteen years' standing, Trollope tells us, has decided "she must bury herself that her daughters might live well above ground." She could have been "as young in heart as her daughters, listened to little nothings from this and that Apollo, had she thought that things had been conformable thereto. Women at forty do not become ancient misanthropes, or stern Rhadamanthine moralists, indifferent to the world's pleasures—no, not even though they be widows." A moment later the author adds, "I think that Mrs. Dale was wrong….She had resolved, as she herself had said often, to put away childish things, and now she pined for those things which she so put away from her." This self-effacement seems to suggest an eerie parallel to the path Lily will choose. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily writes the words Old Maid in her journal, a future she is consciously willing, a vow she deliberately makes. Lily admits to herself, to her friend, at last to John Eames, that something has gone wrong in her life. She is, she confesses, a shattered tree.  The demon lover has destroyed her.

Or has he? 

The actual outside world—in the form of Victorian readers—loved Lily Dale. Trollope tells us she was one of his most popular heroines: readers wrote to beg that a marriage take place; in the real world, two ships were named for her. How can this be, when she behaves so inexplicably? What appeal did such a pathetic creature have for her contemporaries?

In her first infatuation with Crosbie, Lily fits the Victorian image of "the angel in the house," an idea that comes from a poem of that title, a poem of revolting sentimentality, and wildly popular with the middle class at just this time, the late 1850s, early 1860s and even later. The ideal woman, the angel in the house, is held to be meek, passive, obedient and submissive in all things to her husband; her concern is only his well-being and the well-being of their children; and on and on. This cult of angel in the house would have been impossible without that rise in private wealth mentioned earlier: angels being, of course, a class that requires subsidies. Early in their courtship, Crosbie refers to Lily explicitly as an angel. And Lily concurs, will be such an angel for him, herself effaced: she looks forward joyfully. The angel in the house, Virginia Woolf would later say, is a figure that women writers must murder.

Here, among the Century Trollopians, we have come across this kind of woman before—please recall the intelligent Alice Vavasor of Can You Forgive Her? passionate about politics, but who finally chooses a passive life married to John Grey, member from Silverbridge, the "cause" she can serve. More sadly, recall Phineas Finn's first love, Lady Laura Standish, who foolishly marries Mr. Kennedy—not because she loves him, but because her brother needs money--Mr. Robert Kennedy, whose ambitions for women are no more generous or imaginative than "the angel in the house." Phineas and Can You Forgive Her? were written after The Small House at Allington, and I wonder if writing about Lily Dale had pushed Trollope to explore more explicitly how impossible the situation was of intelligent women in Victorian times, at least if they weren't independently wealthy, like Madame Max.

Does this dispose of Lily Dale? Has the demon lover succeeded in destroying her? Not quite. Forgive me for looking ahead to the sequel once more. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, which takes place three years after The Small House, we meet an older, wiser Lily. She encounters the man she once hoped to marry, and discovers that he is not a god, Apollo, but only a man after all.  She is fond of John Eames, but has always understood that he too is a mortal, no god. 

In a very telling late passage in The Last Chronicle, we enter her mind: she loves John Eames dearly, but—but. "…She could not say to herself that he should be her lord and master, the head of her house, the owner of herself, the ruler of her life. The shipwreck to which she had once come, and the fierce doubts that had thence arisen, had forced her to think too much of these things." A younger, more naïve Lily would willingly have sacrificed herself to become an angel of the house for a man she worshipped as a god. But now she understands that she cannot destroy herself for any mere mortal.

A wiser, more mature Lily understands that, as a respectable woman of modest means, Victorian society offers her only two choices: she can marry, and submit to the utter self-sacrifice demanded of angels of the house. Or she can decline to marry, and thus decline to submit and serve. In this reading, the Small House is no longer a perverse step backward into girlhood, but an evasive maneuver sideways—the only way to seize and secure her human autonomy. It will cost her dearly--companionship, children, a loving home. For the older, wiser Lily Dale, it is worth the cost. This is real world that we have missed in these novels—it is there and ineluctable after all. 

Trollope does not say all this explicitly. For all I know, he didn't know it himself consciously. But he knew it as an artist, as one of subtlest observers of the human psyche who ever put pen to paper in the English language. It's left to us, the readers, to choose how to interpret Lily's behavior.  One astute reader, Virginia Woolf, admired the book and its heroine immensely. By coincidence or not, Woolf named one of her own most interesting heroines Lily: Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse. Without my last reading—that Lily refuses to give up her autonomy to a husband, and chooses instead a room of her own—Woolf's admiration would perplex me.

Thus I leave you with questions I have only suggested answers to:

What is the mystery at the heart of Lily Dale's behavior, and hence at the heart of The Small House at Allington? Is she Romantic victim? Or merely unhinged?

Does Lily's choice to remain in the Small House symbolize her fear of moving from girlhood into adulthood, into the larger world? If so, can we blame her, given her experience with the larger world?

Or is the choice she makes to remain single--an old maid--the only rational one left to her, if she wants her autonomy, wants to remain whole, wants to avoid sacrificing herself to the common expectations of Victorian marriage?  If this is so, then isn't Lily Dale a harbinger of the coming revolution in the status of women, one part of the outside world that, for centuries to come, will force itself upon both private and public domains all over the planet? 

I welcome your thoughts, and thank you.

¹ To convert those £800 into today's dollars is problematical, depending on how you calculate. In buying power, it probably translates to about $100,000 a year, adequate for frugal people, not quite enough for a man of fashion living high in the big city.

Copyright © 2005 - 2008 by Pamela McCorduck. All rights reserved.
Modified: March 10, 2008