From Gatherum to Gulgong: Trollope in Australia

On April 24, 1815, just off Russell Square in Bloomsbury, with Napoleon just across the Channel and weeks away from defeat at Waterloo, Anthony Trollope came into the world; a world which he would recreate more perceptively, credibly and readably than any other novelist in that great age of fiction. In his lifetime Britain reached its apogee and its empire grew and Trollope, a man of astonishing energy and endless curiosity—even in late middle age—spent years travelling throughout the English-speaking world. 

His bicentenary seems a good reason to recall his visit to Australia in 1871. He was, as Nigel Starck observes in his fascinating account of that visit (and borrows for his title), The First Celebrity.

No one of such fame had reached our shores before. Charles Darwin had landed in Sydney as long ago as January 1836 when the Beagle dropped anchor. He was “rather disappointed in the state of society”, and thought that “agriculture can never succeed on an extended scale” but he was only twenty-six and his Origin of Species was still more than two decades away. The politician and author Charles Dilke, who had visited in 1867 and produced Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, was also a young man—twenty-three—and still to make his mark. Later in 1867, Queen Victoria’s second son, the twenty-three-year-old Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, came to visit, but he was a royal when royals were royals, not celebrities.

Charles Dickens had contemplated a lecture tour of Australia in 1862 and intended to write a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but the tour was abandoned. Instead, two of his sons, Alfred and Edward, perhaps hoping to get rich like Magwitch, emigrated to New South Wales.

But by 1871, Anthony Trollope was a celebrated Man of Letters, and had written twenty-five novels. His classic, ecclesiastical six-novel Barchester series was complete with the publication of The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). The fourth novel in that series, Framley Parsonage (published as a serial in 1860-61), had brought him enormous popularity. His fellow writer Mrs Gaskell was moved to comment, “I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage forever.”

As he wrote The Last Chronicle, he overheard two clergymen at the Athenaeum Club abusing his practice of introducing reappearing characters, singling out Mrs Proudie— one of literature’s most memorable bishops, a century and a half before the Church permitted the ordination of women. “I got up,” Trollope said, “and standing between them, I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. ‘As to Mrs Proudie,’ I said, ‘I will go home and kill her before the week is over.’ And so I did.” He regretted killing her but he thought The Last Chronicle his best novel. He was at the pinnacle of his career.

He had also distinguished—and endeared—himself by then with one of his loveliest creations, Lady Glencora Palliser, who first appeared in the penultimate Barsetshire novel, The Small House at Allington (1864). Glencora was one of a number of witty, bright, complex, original women he would bring to life. She and her husband, Plantagenet, would sustain his magnificent parliamentary saga, The Pallisers, for six novels. As the Barchester series was about the Church, The Pallisers were about politics, but the appeal of both was that they were not just about ambition. There were love and marriage, justice and morality, poverty and patronage, sport and chance, country life and city living; but most of all they were about character; about real people. Virginia Woolf, the most fastidious of critics, wrote of him that readers believe in Trollope’s characters “as we do in the reality of our weekly bills”, that they get from his novels “the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below”.

Trollope’s domestic life was rather a closed book but his marriage to Rose Heseltine (according to his biographer and editor of his letters, N. John Hall, “the great unknown in Trollope’s life”), whom he had met in Ireland when he worked as a surveyor for the Post Office, was as contented and ordered as his childhood and schooldays had been desolate and chaotic. They had two sons, Harry and Fred. In 1865, seventeen-year-old Fred resolved to try life in Australia and, having honoured a promise to come home to England, in 1865, before finally deciding, he convinced his father to buy a station near Grenfell, New South Wales, called “Mortray”, a three-room, single-storeyed, verandahed homestead with a horse paddock of 250 acres for his twenty horses and 27,500 acres for his 10,000 sheep.

And so on May 24, 1871, Trollope and Rose set sail on the Great Britain “to see my son among his sheep”. He was also canny enough to seal a deal to write a book about Australia and New Zealand and a series of articles for the London Daily Telegraph.

A few months earlier he had published Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, which tellingly recorded that it was natural for a father’s love for his children to be stronger than theirs for him. Ralph the Heir, based on his bruising experience as a Liberal candidate for parliament, was being serialised; The Eustace Diamonds was about to be; and Phineas Redux, the third in his Palliser series, was finished and in a strongbox awaiting publication. He had a desk built on board the Great Britain by the ship’s carpenter and by the time he and Rose reached Melbourne eight weeks later he had written the whole of Lady Anna—sixty-six pages a week, 250 words a page, as he boasted in his Autobiography. He claimed to write novels the same way he took hedges when he hunted—he closed his eyes and charged like hell without a thought of what might lie on the other side.

He was an indefatigable traveller too. As Dr Starck puts it:

Over twelve months and two days, he would ride into the loneliness of the bush, travel to and through all six colonies by steam-ship, and steam-train and stage-coach, descend mines, explore caves, tour asylums, invade an opium den, give evidence to a parliamentary committee, hunt kangaroos and interview convicts.

In Melbourne he was feted in verse by Melbourne Punch as “a laurel-crowned romancer”. He found a city that possessed few advantages of natural geographic charm but had built itself, on the proceeds of the gold rush, into a “magnificent” metropolis of 200,000 people with “an air of wholesomeness and space … noble streets” and “no squalor to be seen”. Although he was unimpressed with Australian fine wines, the one he liked best was what he called the vin ordinaire from Yering in the Yarra Valley.

He wrote that his lifelong quest for the world’s most beautiful harbour ended when he sailed into Sydney. He also recalled “that loveliest of all places, the public gardens at Sydney”. After a week in Sydney he joined the latest gold rush in Gulgong, “a rough place” but not without its charms, where the chair of his reception was Thomas Alexander Browne, who as Rolf Boldrewood would write Robbery under Arms.

From Gulgong, he went to Ballarat, the richest site of alluvial gold in the world. He was appalled by the “horrid dissipation” on the gold fields but on the whole, “I do not think that there is any city close to it that has sprung from gold alone.”

He found Adelaide had the best asylum and Tasmania was the prettiest of the colonies. In Western Australia, the governor of Rottnest Island prison arranged a corroboree for him. He left five shillings for tobacco for the performers. While his views on the Aborigines and their future are repugnant, he felt it was wrong that white prisoners got tobacco as a right, while black ones had to dance for theirs. Before he left Albany, the resident magistrate certified, “that the bearer, A. Trollope … is not and never has been a prisoner of the Crown in Western Australia”.

But at the heart of the visit was Fred. The Trollopes spent a month in October and November 1871 at Mortray. Trollope would sit under a tree in the garden and do his allotted pages of writing before breakfast. His best biographer, Richard Mullen, imagined that the endless diet of mutton must have made Trollope recall his wretched schooldays at Winchester, although Rose and their cook did their best to vary it.

Conscious that Fred had decided to make his life in Australia, Trollope was careful not to be too trenchant in his observations (the reaction to his mother Fanny’s Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832 would still have been ringing in his ears). But still, some of his judgments rankled. His main grievance was the population’s self-adulation (“a tendency to blow”, he called it) “in the way of riding, driving, fighting, walking, working, drinking, love-making, and speech-making”. He found Melbourne the worst offender:

You hear it and hear of it every day. They blow a good deal in Queensland; a good deal in South Australia. They blow even in poor Tasmania. They blow loudly in New South Wales … But the blast of the trumpet as heard in Victoria is louder than all the blasts and the Melbourne blast beats all the other blowing of that proud colony.

His account of his visit, Australia and New Zealand, appeared in 1873, a thumping 1049 pages long. Richard Mullen thought that at times it “read more like a surveyor’s report to the GPO than a travel book” but “what emerged was a pervading spirit of friendliness and pride”.

His Australian experiences also inspired two novels. The hero of his Christmas story, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) was Fred, only lightly disguised, with his property relocated to Queensland, “ready to work himself to the bone” for his adoring young wife. In 1879, in John Caldigate, he devoted four chapters to Australia, recalling the grimness of the gold fields.

Despite Fred’s years of hard work, his venture was defeated by recession and drought and his father sailed again to Australia in 1875 to help his beloved son settle his debts. Fred abandoned Mortray and purchased some back blocks near Cobar but they were never worked. He found a job in the Lands Department. Dr Starck reveals that years later, in a neat twist, Fred—and Charles Dickens’s youngest son, Edward (“Plorn”)—were appointed honorary magistrates in the Wilcannia district—a world away from the chancery benches of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

Trollope had turned sixty on his second antipodean voyage but carried on producing novels to the end. Rather like his characters, he had contradictions of his own. A friend described him: “Crusty, quarrelsome, wrong-headed, prejudiced, obstinate, kind-hearted and thoroughly honest old Tony Trollope.” As his most affectionate biographer, Victoria Glendinning, wrote

Anthony’s inner and outer selves confused many who met him. How could this loud, obstreperous man be the Anthony Trollope who wrote with such extraordinary insight into the hearts of men; and, even more extraordinary, the hearts of women? … when he sat alone at his writing table … He had a genius that was released by another and related duality.

So there was some irony when on November 3, 1882, dining with family, he suffered a seizure while laughing at a passage of F. Anstey’s comic novel, Vice Versa, as it was being read to him by a niece. He never recovered and a month later the Guardian alerted the rectories and vicarages of England that their chronicler was “in a very critical state”. He died on December 6, 1882, and was buried at Kensal Green, twenty years after he had followed his friend Thackeray’s coffin there.

As the remarkable Coral Lansbury, mother of Malcolm Turnbull, summed up in her scholarly study of Trollope, Reasonable Man: Trollope’s Legal Fiction (1981):

When asked once to define the special quality of Trollope, the Philadelphia jurist Henry Drinker spoke of his “deep reasonableness”. It is this reasonableness in an unreasonable world that has always comforted and reassured Trollope’s readers.

One cannot but wish that more of our politicians read him.

Although he was never without his devotees—the Brownings, Tolstoy, Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Noel Coward, Gore Vidal—his reputation waned. Today his work is again valued and he is feted. His forty-seven novels, all now in print (even bettering his prolific mother who had written forty-one books), and a cast of peerless characters—not just Glencora Palliser and Mrs Proudie but Laura Standish and Lizzie Eustace, Septimus Harding and Obadiah Slope, Mr Chaffanbrass and Madame Max Goesler, the old Duke of Omnium and Phineas Finn, Archdeacon Grantly and Johnny Eames, Isabel Boncassen and Signora Neroni.

And as for Trollope’s long-held wish—the spread of English civilisation into every part of the world—Dr Starck tells us that all of Trollope’s descendants, through Fred, now live in Australia, and, what’s more, his great-great grandson, also Anthony, has become Sir Anthony Trollope, 17th Baronet of Casewick. How like so many of his great ancestor’s characters—a venerable title won through chance and misadventure.