 Preface of the Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. Preface. It may be well that I should put a short preface to this book. In the summer of 1878, my father told me that he had written a memoir of his own life. He did not speak about it at length but said that he had written me a letter, not to be opened until after his death containing instructions for publication. This letter was dated 30th April 1876. I will give here as much of it as concerns the public. I wish you to accept as a gift from me, given you now, the accompanying pages which contain a memoir of my life. My intention is that they shall be published after my death and be edited by you. But I leave it all together to your discretion whether to publish or to suppress the work, and also to your discretion whether any part or what part shall be omitted. But I would not wish that anything should be added to the memoir. I wish to say any word as from yourself, let it be done in the shape of a preface or introductory chapter. At the end there is a post script. The publication, if made at all, should be affected as soon as possible after my death. My father died on the 6th of December 1882. It will be seen, therefore, that my duty has been merely to pass the book through the press conformably to the above instructions. I have placed headings to the right-hand pages throughout the book, and I did not conceive that I was precluded from so doing. Additions of any other sort there have been none. The few footnotes are my father's own additions or corrections. And I have made no alterations. I have suppressed some few passages, but not more than what amount to two printed pages has been omitted. My father has not given any of his own letters, nor was it his wish that any should be published. So much, I would say, by way of preface. And I think I may also give in a few words the main incidents in my father's life after he completed his autobiography. He has said that he had given up hunting, but he still kept two horses for such riding as maybe had in or about the immediate neighborhood of London. He continued to ride to the end of his life. He liked the exercise, and I think it would have distressed him not to have had a horse in his stable. But he never spoke willingly on hunting matters. He had at last resolved to give up his favorite amusement, and that as far as he was concerned, there should be an end of it. In the spring of 1877, he went to South Africa and returned early in the following year with a book on the colony already written. In the summer of 1878, he was one of a party of ladies and gentlemen who made an expedition to Iceland in the Mastiff, one of Mr. John Burns' steamships. The journey lasted altogether sixteen days, and during that time Mr. and Mrs. Burns were the hospitable entertainers. When my father returned, he wrote a short account of how the Mastiffs went to Iceland. The book was printed, but was intended only for private circulation. Every day, until his last illness, my father continued his work. He would not otherwise have been happy. He demanded from himself less than he had done ten years previously, but his daily task was always done. I will mention now the titles of his books that were published after the last included in the list which he himself is given at the end of the second volume. An Eye for an Eye, 1879 Cousin Henry, 1879 Thackeray, 1879 The Duke's Children, 1880 Life of Cicero, 1880 Ayala's Angel, 1881 Dr. Wardle's School, 1881 Frau Froman and Other Stories, 1882 Lord Palmerston, 1882 The Fixed Period, 1882 Kept in the Dark, 1882 Mr. Scarborough's Family, 1883 At the time of his death, he had written four-fifths of an Irish story called The Landleaguers, shortly about to be published. And he left in manuscript a completed novel called An Old Man's Love, which will be published by Monsieur Blackwood and Sons in 1884. In the summer of 1880, my father left London and went to live at Harding, a village in Sussex, but on the confines of Hampshire. I think he chose that spot because he found there a house that suited him, and because of the prettiness of the neighborhood. His last long journey was a trip to Italy in the late winter and spring of 1881, but he went to Ireland twice in 1882. He went there in May of that year, and was then absent nearly a month. This journey did him much good, for he found that the softer atmosphere relieved his asthma, from which he had been suffering for nearly 18 months. In August following he made another trip to Ireland, but from this journey he derived less benefit. He was much interested in and was very much distressed by the unhappy condition of the country. Few men know Ireland better than he did. He had lived there for 16 years, and his post office word had taken him into every part of the island. In the summer of 1882 he began his last novel, The Landleaguers, which, as stated above, was unfinished when he died. This book was a cause of anxiety to him. He could not rid his mind of the fact that he had a story already in the course of publication, but which he had not yet completed. In no other case except family parsonage did my father publish even the first number of any novel before he had fully completed the whole tale. On the evening of the 3rd of November, 1882, he was seized with paralysis on the right side, accompanied by loss of speech. His mind had also failed, though at intervals his thoughts would return to him. After the first three weeks these lucid intervals became rarer, but it was always very difficult to tell how far his mind was sound or how far astray. He died on the evening of the 6th of December following, nearly five weeks from the night of his attack. I have been led to say these few words, not at all from a desire to supplement my father's biography of himself, but to mention the main incidents in his life after he had finished his own record. In what I have here said, I do not think I have exceeded his instructions. Henry M. Trollop, September 1883. End of The Preface, recording by Jessica Louise, St. Paul, Minnesota. Chapter 1 of the Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. Chapter 1. My Education. 1815-1834. In writing these pages, which for the want of a better name I shall be feigned to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person is myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life as of what I and perhaps others around me have done in literature. Of my failures and successes, such as they have been and their causes, and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And yet the gerulity of old age and the aptitude of a man's mind to recur to the passages of his own life will, I know, tempt me to say something of myself. Nor without doing so should I know how to throw my matter into any recognized and intelligible form. That I or any man should tell everything of himself I hold to be impossible. Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there that has done none? But this I protest, that nothing that I say shall be untrue. I will set down not in malice, nor will I give to myself or others honor which I do not believe to have been fairly one. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be. My misfortunes arising from a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an utter want on my part of the juvenile manhood which enables some boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such a position is sure to produce. I was born in 1815 in Keppel Street, Russell Square, and while a baby was carried down to Harrow, where my father had built a house on a large farm which in an evil hour he took on a long lease from Lord Northwick. That farm was the grave of all my father's hopes, ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother's sufferings and of those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny and of ours. My father had been a Wikimist and a fellow of New College, and Winchester was the destination of my brothers and myself. But as he had friends among the masters at Harrow, and as the school offered an education almost gratuitous to children living in the parish, he with a certain aptitude to do things differently from others which accompanied him throughout his life, determined to use that August Seminary as Tother School for Winchester, and sent three of us there, one after the other, at the age of seven. My father at this time was a chancery barrister practicing in London, occupying dingy, almost suicidal chambers at number 23 Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, chambers which on one melancholy occasion did become absolutely suicidal. Footnote, a pupil of his destroyed himself in the rooms. He was, as I have been informed by those quite competent to know, an excellent and most conscientious lawyer, but plagued with so bad a temper that he drove the attorneys from him. In his early days he was a man of some small fortune and of higher hopes. These stood so high at the time of my birth that he was felt to be entitled to a country house as well as to that in Keppel Street, and in order that he might build such a residence he took up the farm. This place he called Julien's, and the land runs up to the foot of the hill on which the school and the church stand, on the side towards London. Things there went much against him. The farm was ruinous, and I remember that we all regarded the Lord Northick of those days as a cormorant who was eating us up. My father's clients deserted him. He purchased various dark gloomy chambers in and about Chancery Lane, and his purchases always went wrong. Then as a final crushing blow, an old uncle whose heir he was to have been married and had a family. The house in London was let, and also the house he built in Harrow, from which he descended to a farmhouse on the land, which I have endeavored to make known to some readers under the name of Orly Farm. This place, just as it was when we lived there, is to be seen in the frontispiece to the first edition of that novel, having the good fortune to be delineated by no less a pencil than that of John Millet. My two elder brothers had been sent as day-borders to Harrow's school from the Bigger House, and may probably have been received among the aristocratic crowd, not on equal terms because a day-border at Harrow in those days was never so received, but at any rate, as other day-borders. I do not suppose that they were well treated, but I doubt whether they were subjected to the ignominy which I endured. I was only seven, and I think that boys at seven are now spared among their more considerate seniors. I was never spared, and was not even allowed to run to and fro between our house and the school without a daily purgatory. No doubt my appearance was against me. I remember well when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler the headmaster stopping me in the street and asking me with all the clouds of jove upon his brow and the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow's school was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a boy as I. Oh, what I felt at that moment. But I could not look my feelings. I do not doubt that I was dirty, but I think that he was cruel. He must have known me had he seen me as he was want to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face. At this time I was three years at Harrow, and as far as I can remember I was the junior boy in the school when I left it. Then I was sent to a private school at Sunbury kept by Arthur Drury. This I think must have been done in accordance with the advice of Henry Drury who was my tutor at Harrow's school and my father's friend and who may probably have expressed an opinion that my juvenile career was not proceeding in a satisfactory manner at Harrow. To Sunbury I went and during the two years I was there, though I never had any pocket money and seldom had much in the way of clothes, I lived more nearly on terms of equality with other boys than at the other period during my very prolonged school days. Even here I was always in disgrace. I remember well how on one occasion four boys were selected as having been the perpetrators of some nameless horror. What it was to this day I cannot even guess, but I was one of the four, innocent as a babe, but a judge to have been the guiltiest of the guilty. We each had to write out a sermon and my sermon was the longest of the four. During the whole of one term time we were helped last at every meal. We were not allowed to visit the playground till the sermon was finished. Mine was only done a day or two before the holidays. Mrs. Jury, when she saw us, shook her head with pitying horror. There were ever so many other punishments accumulated on our heads. It broke my heart knowing myself to be innocent and suffering also under the almost equally painful feeling that the other three, no doubt wicked boys, were the curled darlings of the school who would never have selected me to share their wickedness with them. I contrived to learn from words that fell from Mr. Jury that he condemned me because I, having come from a public school, might be supposed to be the leader of wickedness. On the first day of the next term he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong. With all a stupid boy's slowness I said nothing and he had not the courage to carry reparation further. All that was fifty years ago and it brings me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered curse those boys must have been not to have told the truth at any rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well and almost wished to write them here. When I was twelve there came the vacancy at Winchester College which I was destined to fill. My two elder brothers had gone there and the younger had been taken away, being already supposed to have lost his chance of new college. It had been one of the great ambitions of my father's life that his three sons, who lived to go to Winchester, should all become fellows of new college. But that suffering man was never destined to have an ambition gratified. We all lost the prize which he struggled with infinite labor to put within our reach. My eldest brother all but achieved it and afterwards went to Oxford, taking three exhibitions from the school, though he lost the great glory of a wickamist. He has since made himself well known to the public as a writer in connection with all Italian subjects. He's still living as I now write, but my other brother died early. While I was at Winchester my father's affairs went from bad to worse. He gave up his practice at the bar and unfortunate that he was took another farm. It is odd that a man should conceive, and in this case a highly educated and a very clever man, that farming should be a business in which he might make money without any special education or apprenticeship. Perhaps of all trades it is the one in which an accurate knowledge of what things should be done and the best manner of doing them is most necessary. And it is one also for success in which a sufficient capital is indispensable. He had no knowledge and when he took this second farm no capital. This was the last step preparatory to his final ruin. Soon after I had been sent to Winchester my mother went to America, taking with her my brother Henry and my two sisters, who were then no more than children. This was I think in 1827. I have no clear knowledge of her object or of my father's, but I believe that he had an idea that money might be made by sending goods, little goods such as pin cushions, pepper boxes and pocket knives, out to the still unfurnished states, and that she conceived that an opening might be made for my brother Henry by erecting some bazaar or extended shop in one of the western cities. Once the money came I do not know, but the pocket knives and the pepper boxes were bought and the bazaar built. I have seen it since in the town of Cincinnati. A sorry building. But I have been told that in those days it was an imposing edifice. My mother went first with my sisters and second brother. Then my father followed them taking my elder brother before he went to Oxford. But there was an interval of some year and a half during which he and I were in Winchester together. Over a period of forty years since I began my manhood at a desk in the post office, I and my brother Thomas Adolphus have been fast friends. There have been hot words between us for perfect friendship bears and allows hot words. Few brothers have had more of brotherhood. But in those school days he was, of all my foes, the worst. In accordance with the practice of the college which submits or did then submit much of the tuition of the younger boys from the elder, he was my tutor. And in his capacity of teacher and ruler, he had studied the theories of Draco. I remember well how he used to exact obedience after the manner of that lawgiver. Hang a little boy for stealing apples, he used to say. And other little boys will not steal apples. The doctrine was already exploded elsewhere but he stuck to it with conservative energy. The result was that as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big stick. That such thrashings should have been possible at a school as a continual part of one's daily life seems to me to argue a very ill condition of school discipline. At this period I remember to have passed one set of holidays, the mid-summer holidays in my father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. There was often a difficulty about the holidays as to what should be done with me. On this occasion my amusement consisted in wandering about among those old deserted buildings and in reading Shakespeare out of a bi-columned edition which is still among my books. It was not that I had chosen Shakespeare but that there was nothing else to read. After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father to America. Then another and a different horror fell to my fate. My college bills had not been paid and the school tradesmen who administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-hankerchiefs which, with some slight supervalence, were at the command of other scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My school fellows of course knew that it was so and I became a pariah. It is the nature of boys to be cruel. I sometimes doubted whether among each other they do usually suffer much, one from the other's cruelty, but I suffered horribly. I could make no stand against it, I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big and awkward and ugly and I have no doubt sulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, aha, well I remember all the agonies of my young heart, how I considered whether I should always be alone, whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower and from thence put an end to everything. And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling-a-week pocket-money which we called Battles and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master. On one awful day the second master announced to me that my battles would be stopped. He told me the reason, the battles for the last half year had not been repaid and he urged his own unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a shilling-a-week would not have been much, even though pocket-money from other sources never reached me, but that the other boys all knew it. Every now and again perhaps three or four times in a half year, these weekly shillings were given to certain servants of the college. In payment it may be presumed for some extra services. And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy and the cause of the defalcation was explained to him. I never saw one of those servants without feeling I had picked his pocket. When I had been at Winchester something over three years, my father returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because of the expense or because my chance of new college was supposed to have passed away, I do not know. As a fact I should, I believe, have gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional number of vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there would have been no funds for my maintenance at the university, till I should have entered in upon the fruition of the founder's endowment and my career at Oxford must have been unfortunate. When I left Winchester I had three more years of school before me, having as yet endured nine. My father at this time, having left my mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself to live at a wretched, tumbled-on farmhouse on the second farm he had hired. And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three miles from Harrow at Harrow Weld, but in the parish, and from this house I was again sent to that school as a day-border. Let those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual appurtenances of a boy at such a school consider what must have been my condition among them. With a daily walk of twelve miles through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labors of a school life. Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition, walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seemed always to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dung heaps, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended. There was a parlor in which my father lived, shut up among big books, but I passed my most jokened hours in the kitchen, making innocent love to the bailiff's daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening when the horrors of the school were over, but it all added to the cruelty of the days. A scissor at Cambridge College, or a Bible clerk at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a century ago, but his position was recognised and the misery was measured. I was a scissor at a fashionable school, a condition never premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy reeking from a dung hill to sit next to the sons of peers, or much worse still next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me, those of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no place, nor did I learn anything, for I was taught nothing. The only expense except that of books to which a house-boarder was then subject was the fee to a tutor, a mounting I think to ten guineas. My tutor took me without the fee, but when I heard him declare the fact in the pupil room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the charity. I was never a coward and cared for a thrashing as little as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of three hundred tyrants, without a moral courage of which at that time I possessed none. I know that I sulked, and was odious to the eyes of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion, and there came a great fight, at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed, I trust that some school fellow of those days may still be left alive, who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my school days, I am not making a false boast. I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that farmhouse. My elder brother, Tom as I must call him in my narrative, though the world I think knows him best as a dolefus, was at Oxford. My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty, there was a large, rambling kitchen garden but no gardener, and many times verbal incentives were made to me, generally I fear in vain, to get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hay fields on holidays I was often compelled to go, not I fear with much profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when suffering. He had at this time commenced a work, an encyclopedia ecclesiastica as he called it, on which he labored to the moment of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions. Under crushing disadvantages with few or no books of reference, with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out of eight had been published by subscription, and are now I fear unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts. And my father, though he would try, as it were, by a sidewind, to get a useful spur of work out of me, either in the garden or in the hay field, had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement. From my very babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to take my place alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the morning and say my early rules from the Latin grammar, or repeat the Greek alphabet, and was obliged at these early lessons to hold my head inclined towards him so that in the event of guilty fault he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his shaving brush. No father was ever more anxious for the education of his children. Though I think none ever knew less how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as I can remember, he never recognized the need. He allowed himself no distraction and did not seem to think it necessary to a child. I cannot but think me of ought that he ever did for my gratification, but for my welfare, for the welfare of us all, he was willing to make any sacrifice. At this time in the farmhouse at Harrow Well, he could not give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was not in the fields was devoted to his monks and nuns, but he would require me to sit at a table with lexicon and greatest before me. As I look back on my resolute idleness and fixed determination to make no use whatever of the books thus thrust upon me, or of the hours, and as I bear in mind the consciousness of great energy and afterlife, I am in doubt whether my nature is wholly altered or whether his plan was wholly bad. In those days he never punished me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness, but in passion he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great folio Bible which he always used. In the old house were the two first volumes of Cooper's novel called The Prairie, like probably a dishonest relic of some subscription to Hookam's Library. Other books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many dozen times I read those two first volumes. It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet is a walk along an English lane when the air is sweet and the weather fine, and when there is a charm in walking. But here were the same lanes four times a day in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with all the accompanying mud and dust and with disordered clothes. I might have been known among all the boys at a hundred yards distance by my boots and trousers, and was conscious at all times that I was so known. I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler when I was a little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have said the same thing any day, only that Dr. Longley, never in his life was able to say an ill-natured word. Dr. Butler only became dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be archbishop of Canterbury. I think it was in the autumn of 1831 that my mother, with the rest of the family, returned from America. She lived at first at the farmhouse, but it was only for a short time. She came back with a book written about the United States, and the immediate pecuniary success which that work obtained enabled her to take us all back to the house at Harrow. Not to the first house, which would still have been beyond her means, but to that which has since been called Orly Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at Harrow Weld. Here my schooling went on under somewhat improved circumstances. The three miles became half a mile, and probably some salutary changes were made in my wardrobe. My mother and sisters too were there, and a great element of happiness was added to us all in the affectionate and life-enduring friendship of the family of our close neighbor, Colonel Grant. But I was never able to overcome, or even to attempt to overcome, the absolute isolation of my school position. Of the cricket ground or racket court, I was allowed to know nothing, and yet I longed for these things with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a covetness that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school days has clung to me all through life. Not that I have ever shunned to speak of them as openly as I'm writing now, but that when I have been claimed as school fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at Harrow or Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in estrangement. Through all my father's troubles, he still desired to send me either to Oxford or Cambridge. My elder brother went to Oxford and Henry to Cambridge. It all depended on my ability to get some scholarship that would help me to live at the university. I had many chances. There were exhibitions from Harrow, which I never got. Twice I tried for a sizeship at Clare Hall, but in vain. Once I made a futile attempt for a scholarship at Trinity Oxford, but failed again. Then the idea of a university career was abandoned, and very fortunate it was to succeed, for my career with such assistance only as a scholarship would have given me would have ended in debt and ignominy. When I left Harrow, I was all but nineteen, and I had at first gone there at seven. During the whole of those twelve years, no attempt had been made to teach me anything but Latin and Greek, and very little attempt to teach me those languages. I do not remember any lessons either in writing or arithmetic. French and German, I certainly was not taught. The assertion will scarcely be credited, but I do assert that I have no recollection of other tuition, except that in the dead languages. At the school at Sunbury, there was certainly a writing master and a French master. The latter was an extra, and I never had extras. I suppose I must have been in the writing master's class, but though I can call to mind the man, I find his ferrule. It was by their ferrules that I always knew them, and they me. I feel convinced in my mind that I have been fogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all. Looking back over half a century, I'm not quite sure whether the boast is true, but if I did not, nobody ever did. And yet when I think how little I knew of Latin or Greek on Leaving Harrow at 19, I'm astonished at the possibility of such waste of time. I am now a fair Latin scholar that is to say I read and enjoy the Latin classics, and could probably make myself understood in Latin prose. But the knowledge which I have, I have acquired since I left school. No doubt aided much by that groundwork of the language, which will in the process of years make its way slowly, even through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson. When I left Harrow, I was nearly at the top of the school being a monitor and I think the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about, but I never got a prize. From the first to the last, there was nothing satisfactory in my school career, except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be taken home to be cured. End of chapter one, recording by Jessica Louise, St. Paul, Minnesota. Chapter two of the autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. Chapter two. My mother. Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of all the Trollops, I must say a few words of my mother, partly because filial duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent who made for herself a considerable name in the literature of her day, and partly because there were circumstances in her career well worthy of notice. She was the daughter of Reverend William Milton, vicar of Heckfield, who as well as my father had been a fellow of New College. She was nearly thirty when in 1809 she married my father. Six or seven years ago a bundle of love letters from her to him fell into my hand in a very singular way, having been found in the house of a stranger, who with much courtesy sent them to me. They were then about sixty years old and had been written some before and some after her marriage over the space of perhaps a year. In no novel of Richardson's or Miss Burney's have I seen a correspondence at the same time so sweet, so graceful, and so well expressed. But the marvel of these letters was in the strange difference they bore to the love letters of the present day. They are all of them on square paper, then sealed and addressed to my father on circuit. But the language in each, though it almost borders on the romantic, is beautifully chosen and fit without change of a syllable for the most critical eye. What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of addiction? She dearly likes a little slang and revels in the luxury of entire familiarity with a new strange being. There's something in that too, pleasant to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not conduce to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer of prose and reveled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her to the last. In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages. One of whom one still lives. But she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to her, with the destiny before us three of writing more books than were probably ever before produced by a single family. Footnote. The family of Estienne, the great French printers of the 15th and 16th centuries, of whom there were at least nine or ten, did more perhaps for the production of literature than any other family. But they, though they edited and not unfrequently translated the works which they published, were not authors in the ordinary sense. My married sister added to the number by one little anonymous high church story called Colerton. From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went to America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the world. She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal role in professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles. An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate or a French proletaire with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome in the modest hospitality of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory and thought that archduchesses were sweet. But with her politics were always an affair of the heart, as indeed were all her convictions. Of reasoning from causes I think she knew nothing. Her heart was in every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic. But it must be acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now her books and can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best were Dante and Spencer, but she raved also of him of whom all such ladies were raving then, and rejoiced in the popularity and wept over the persecution of Lord Byron. She was among those who seized with avidity on the novels, as they came out, of the then unknown Scott, and who could still talk of the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth. With the literature of the day she was familiar, and with the poets of the past. Of other reading I do not think she had mastered much. Her life I take it, though utterly clouded by many troubles, was easy, luxurious, and idle, till my father's affairs and her own aspirations sent her to America. She had dear friends among literary people of whom I remember Matthias, Henry Milman, and Miss Landon, but till long after middle life she never herself wrote a line for publication. In 1827 she went to America, having been partly instigated by the social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember, a certain Miss Wright, who was I think the first of the American female lecturers. Her chief desire, however, was to establish my brother Henry, and perhaps joined with that was the additional object of breaking up her English home without pleading broken fortunes to all the world. At Cincinnati, in the state of Ohio, she built a bizarre, and I fancy lost all the money which may have been embarked in the nation. It could not have been much, and I think that others also must have suffered. But she looked about her, at her American cousins, and resolved to write a book about them. This book she brought back with her in 1831, and published it early in 1832. When she did this she was already fifty. When doing this she was aware that unless she could so succeed in making money there was no money for any of the family. She had never before earned a shilling. She almost immediately received a considerable sum from the publishers, if I remember rightly amounting to two sums of four hundred pounds each within a few months, and from that moment till nearly the time of her death at any rate for more than twenty years she was in the receipt of a considerable income from her writings. It was a late age at which to begin such a career. The domestic manners of the Americans was the first of a series of books of travels, of which it was probably the best, and was certainly the best known. It will not be too much to say of it that it had a material effect upon the manners of the Americans of the day, and that that effect has been fully appreciated by them. No observer was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects or even of the happiness of a young people. No one could have been worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women do, from her own standing point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes it ought to be ugly to all eyes, and if ugly it must be bad. What though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear if they put their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters. The Americans were to her rough, uncouth and vulgar, and she told them so. Those communistic and social ideas which had been so pretty in a drawing room were scattered to the winds. Her volumes were very bitter, but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin. Book followed book immediately, first two novels and then a book on Belgium and western Germany. She refurnished the house which I have called Orly Farm and surrounded us again with moderate comforts. Of the mixture of joviality and industry which formed her character it is almost impossible to speak with exaggeration. The industry was a thing apart kept to herself. It was not necessary that anyone who lived with her should see it. She was at her table at four in the morning and had finished her work before the world had begun to be aroused. But the joviality was all for others. She could dance with other people's legs eat and drink with other people's palates be proud with a luster of other people's finery. Every mother can do that for her own daughters, but she could do it for any girl whose look and voice and manners pleased her. Even when she was at work the laughter of those she loved was a pleasure to her. She had much, very much to suffer. Work sometimes came hard to her so much being required for she was extravagant and liked to have money to spend. But of all people I have known she was the most joyous or at any rate the most capable of joy. We continued this renewed life at Harrow for nearly two years during which I was still at the school and at the end of which I was nearly 19. Then there came a catastrophe. My father, who when he was well lived a sad life among his monks and nuns, still kept a horse and gig. One day in March, 1834 just as it had been decided that I should leave the school then instead of remaining as it had been intended till mid-summer I was summoned very early in the morning to drive him up to London. He had been ill and must still have been very ill indeed submitted to be driven by anyone. It was not till we had started that he told me that I was to put him on board the Ostend boat. This I did driving him through the city down to the docks. It was not within his nature to be communicative and to the last he never told me why he was going to Ostend. Something of a general flitting abroad I had heard before but why should he have flown first and flown so suddenly at least no till I returned. When I got back with the gig the house and furniture were all in the charge of the sheriff's officers. The gardener who had been with us in former days stopped me as I drove up the road and with gestures signs and whispered words gave me to understand that the whole affair, horse, gig and barnas would be made prize of if I went but a few yards further. Why they should not have been made prize of I do not know. The little piece of dishonest business which I at once took in hand and carried through successfully was of no special service to any of us. I drove the gig into the village and sold the entire equipage to the ironmonger for seventeen pounds the exact sum which he claimed as being due to himself. I was much complimented by the gardener who seemed to think that so much had been rescued out of fire. I fancy that the ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness. When I got back to the house a scene of devastation was in progress which still was not without its amusement. My mother, through her various troubles, had contrived to keep a certain number of pretty-pretties which were dear to her heart. They were not much, for in those days the ornamentation of houses was not lavish as it is now, but with some china and a little glass a few books and a very moderate supply of household silver. These things and things like them were being carried down surreptitiously through a gap between the two gardens on the premises of our friend Colonel Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the Grant girls who were just younger were the chief marauders. To such forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise and between us we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers amidst the anathemas but good-humored abstinence from personal violence of the men in charge of the property. I still own a few books that were thus perloined. For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel's hospitable roof cared for and comforted by that dearest of all women, his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium and established ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of Bruges. At this time until my father's death everything was done with money earned by my mother. She now again furnished the house, this being the third that she had put in order since she came back from America two and a half years ago. There were six of us went into this new banishment. My brother Henry had left Cambridge and was ill. My younger sister was ill and though as yet we hardly told each other that it was so we began to feel that desolating friend consumption was among us. My father was broken-hearted as well as ill but whenever he could sit at his table he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My elder sister and I were in good health but I was an idle desolate hanger on that most hopeless of human beings a hobbly hoy of nineteen without any idea of a career or a profession or a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy for there were pretty girls in Bruges with whom I could fancy that I was in love and I had been removed from the real misery of school. But as to my future life I had not even an aspiration. Now and again there would arise a feeling that it was hard upon my mother that she should have to do so much for us that we should be idle while she was forced to work so constantly but we should probably have thought more of that had she not taken to work as though it were the recognized condition of life for an old lady of fifty-five. Then by degrees an established sorrow was at home among us. My brother was an invalid and the horrid word which of all words were for some years after the most dreadful to us had been pronounced. It was no longer a delicate chest and some temporary necessity for peculiar care but consumption. The Bruges doctor had said so and we knew that he was right. From that time forth my mother's most visible occupation was that of nursing. There were two sick men in the house and hers were the hands that tended them. The novels went on of course. We'd already learned to know that they would be forthcoming at stated intervals and they always were forthcoming. The doctor's vials and the ink bottle held equal places in my mother's rooms. I've written many novels under many circumstances but I doubt much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two parts and keeping her intellect itself clear from the troubles of the world and fit for the duty it had to do. I never saw equaled. I did not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott. My mother went through it unscathed in strength though she performed all the work of day nurse and night nurse to a sick household for there were soon three of them dying. At this time there came from some quarter an offer to me of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment and so it was apparently my destiny to be a soldier but I must first learn German and French of which languages I knew almost nothing. For this a year was allowed me and in order that it might be accomplished without expense I undertook the duties of a classical usher to a school then kept by William Drury at Brussels. Mr. Drury had been one of the masters at Harrow when I went there at seven years old and is now after an interval of 53 years even yet officiating his clergyman at that place. Footnote. He died two years after these words were written. To Brussels I went and my heart still sinks within me as I reflect that anyone should have entrusted to me the tuition of 30 boys. I can only hope that those boys went there to learn French and that their parents were not particular as to their classical requirements. I remember that on two occasions I was sent to take the school out for a walk but that after the second attempt Mrs. Drury declared that the boys clothes would not stand any further experiments of that kind. I cannot call to mind any learning by me of other languages but as I only remained in that position for six weeks perhaps the return lessons had not been as yet commenced. At the end of the six weeks a letter reached me offering me a clerkship in the general post office and I accepted it. Among my mother's dearest friends she reckoned Mrs. Freeling, the wife of Clayton Freeling, whose father served Francis Freeling then ruled the post office. She had heard of my desolate position and had begged from her father in law the offer of a birth in his own office. I hurried back from Brussels to Bruges on my way to London and found that the number of invalids had been increased. My younger sister Emily, who when I had left the house was trembling on the balance, who had been pronounced to be delicate but with that false-tongued hope which will lie lest the heart should faint, had been called delicate but only delicate, was now ill. Of course she was doomed. I knew it of both of them, though I had never heard the word spoken or had spoken it to anyone. And my father was very ill, ill to dying, though I did not know it. And my mother had decreed to send my elder sister away to England thinking that the vicinity of so much sickness might be injurious to her. All this happened late in the autumn of 1834 in the spring of which year we had come to Bruges. And then my mother was left alone in a big house outside the town with two Belgian women servants to nurse these dying patients, the patients being her husband and children, and to write novels for the sustenance of the family. It was about this period of her career that her best novels were written. To my own initiation at the post office I will return in the next chapter. Just before Christmas my brother died and was buried at Bruges. In the following February my father died and was buried alongside of him and with him died that tedious task of his which I can only hope may have solaced many of his latter hours. I sometimes look back, meditating for hours together on his adverse fate. He was a man finally educated of great parts with immense capacity for work, physically strong very much beyond the average of men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to fair fortunes who, when he started in the world, may be said to have had nothing at his feet. But everything went wrong with him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure. He embarked in one hopeless enterprise after another, spending on each all the money he could at the time command. But the worst curse to him of all was a temper so irritable that even those whom he loved the best could not endure it. We were all estranged from him, and yet I believe that he would have given his heart's blood for any of us. His life as I knew it was one long tragedy. After his death, my mother moved to England and took and furnished a small house at Hadley near Barnet. I was then a clerk in the London Post Office, and I remember well how gay she made the place with little dinners, little dances and little picnics, while she herself was at work every morning long before others had left their beds. But she did not stay at Hadley much above a year. She went up to London, where she again took and furnished a house from which my remaining sister was married and carried away into Cumberland. My mother soon followed her, and on this occasion did more than take a house. She bought a bit of land, a field of three acres near the town and built a residence for herself. This I think was in 1841, and she had thus established and re-established herself six times in ten years. But in Cumberland she found the climate too severe, and in 1844 she moved herself to Florence, where she remained till her death in 1863. She continued writing up to 1854 when she was 76 years old, and had at that time produced 114 volumes of which the first was not written till she was 50. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence. She was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman with great capacity for enjoyment and high physical gifts. She was endowed too with much native power, with considerable humor, and a genuine feeling for romance. But she was neither clear-sighted nor accurate, and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of them. End of Chapter 2 Recording by Jessica Louise, St. Paul, Minnesota. Chapter 3 of the Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. Chapter 3, The General Post Office. 1834-1841. While I was still learning my duty as an usher at Mr. Drury's school at Brussels, I was summoned to my clerkship in the London Post Office, and on my way passed through Bruges. I then saw my father Henry for the last time. A sadder household never was held together. They were all dying, except my mother, who would sit up night after night nursing the dying ones and writing novels the while, so that there might be a decent roof for them to die under. Had she failed to write the novels, I do not know where the roof would have been found. It is now more than 40 years ago, and looking back over so long a lapse of time, I can tell the story, though it be the story of my own father and mother, of my own brother and sister. Almost as coldly as I have often done some scene of intended pathos in fiction, but that scene was indeed full of pathos. I was then becoming alive to the blighted ambition of my father's life, and becoming alive also to the violence of the strain which my mother was enduring. But I could do nothing, but go and leave them. There was something that comforted me in the idea that I need no longer be a burden, a fallacious idea as it soon proved, and my salary was to be 90 pounds a year, and on that I was to live in London, keep up my characters of gentlemen, and be happy. That I should have thought this possible at the age of 19, and should have been delighted at being able to make the attempt, does not surprise me now, but others should have thought it possible. Friends who knew something of the world does astonish me. A lad might have done so no doubt or might do so even in these days who was properly looked after and kept under control, on whose behalf some law of life had been laid down. Let him pay so much a week for his board and lodging so much for his clothes, so much for his washing, and then let him understand that he has, shall we say, six pence a day left for pocket money and omnibuses. Anyone making the calculation will find the six pence far too much. No such calculation was made for me or by me. It was supposed that a sufficient income had been secured to me, and that I should live upon it as other clerks lived. But as yet, the 90 pounds a year was not secured to me. On reaching London, I went to my friend Clayton Freeling, who was then secretary at the stamp office, and was taken by him to the scene of my future labors in St. Martin's Le Grand. Sir Francis Freeling was the secretary, but he was greatly too high an official to be seen at first by a new junior clerk. I was taken, therefore, to his eldest son Henry Freeling, who was the assistant secretary, and by him I was examined as to my fitness. The story of that examination is given accurately in one of the opening chapters of a novel written by me, called The Three Clerks. If any reader of this memoir would refer to that chapter and see how Charlie Tudor was supposed to have been admitted into the internal navigation office, that reader will learn how Anthony Trollope was actually admitted into the secretary's office of the general post office in 1834. I was asked to copy some lines from the Times newspaper with an old quill pen, and at once made a series of blots and false spellings. That won't do, you know, said Henry Freeling to his brother Clayton. Clayton, who was my friend, urged that I was nervous, and asked that I might be allowed to do a bit of writing at home and bring it as a sample on the next day. I was then asked whether I was a proficient in arithmetic. What could I say? I had never learned the multiplication table, and had no more idea of the rule of arithmetic than of conic sections. I know a little of it, I said humbly, whereupon I was sternly assured that on the morrow should I succeed in showing that my handwriting was all that it ought to be, I should be examined so as to that little of arithmetic. If that little should not be found to comprise a thorough knowledge of all the ordinary rules, together with practice and quick skill, my career in life could not be made at the post office. In the main stairs of the building, stairs which have I believe been now pulled down to make room for sorters and stampers, Clayton Freeling told me not to be too downhearted. I was myself inclined to think that I had better go back to the school in Brussels. But nevertheless I went to work, and under the surveillance of my elder brother made a beautiful transcript of four or five pages of Gibbon. With a faltering heart I took these on the next day to the office. The calligraphy I was contented, but was certain that I should come to the ground among the figures. But when I got to the Grand, as we used to call our office in those days, from its site in St. Martin's Le Grand, I was seated at a desk without any further reference to my competency. No one condescended even to look at my beautiful penmanship. That was the way in which candidates for the civil service were examined in my young days. It was at any rate the time. Since that time there has been a very great change indeed, and in some respects a great improvement. But in regard to the absolute fitness of the young men selected for the public service, I doubt whether more harm has not been done than good. And I think that good might have been done without the harm. The rule of the present day is that every place shall be open to public competition, and that it shall be given to the best among the comers. I object to this, that at present there exists no known mode of learning who is best, and that the method employed has no tendency to elicit the best. That method pretends only to decide who among a certain number of lads will best answer a string of questions for the answering of which they are prepared by tutors, who have sprung up for the purpose since this fashion of election has been adopted. When it is decided in a family that a boy shall try the civil service, he's made to go a certain amount of cramming. But such treatment has, I maintain, no connection whatever with education. The lad is no better fitted after it than he was before for the future work of his life. But his very success fills him with false ideas of his own educational standing, and so far unfits him. And by the plan now invoked, it has come to pass that no one is in truth responsible either for the conduct, the manners, or even for the character of the youth. The responsibility was perhaps slight before, but existed, and was on the increase. There might have been, in some future time of still increased wisdom, there yet may be, a department established to test the fitness of acolytes without recourse to the dangerous optimism of competitive choice. I will not say but that there should have been someone to reject me, though I will have the responsibility, and so rejected, the civil service would have lost a valuable public servant. This is a statement that will not, I think, be denied by those who, after I'm gone, may remember anything of my work. Lads, no doubt, should not be admitted who have none of the small requirements that are wanted. Our offices should not be schools in which writing and early lessons in geography, arithmetic, or French should be learned. The desire to ensure the efficiency of the young men selected has not been the only object, perhaps not the chief object, of those who have yielded in this matter to the arguments of the reformers. There had arisen in England a system of patronage under which it had become gradually necessary for politicians to use their influence for the purchase of political support. A member of the House of Commons holding office, who might chance workshops to give away in a year, found himself compelled to distribute them among those who sent him to the House. In this, there was nothing pleasant to the distributor of patronage. Do away with the system altogether, and he would have as much chance of support as another. He bartered his patronage only because another did so also. The beggings, the refusings, the jealousies, the correspondence were simply troublesome. Gentlemen in office were not therefore indisposed to rid themselves of the care of patronage. I have no doubt their hands are the cleaner and their hearts are the lighter, but I do doubt whether the offices are on the whole better man'd. As what I now write will certainly never be read till I'm dead, I may dare to say what no one now does dare to say in print, though some of us whisper it occasionally into our friend's ears. There are places in life which can hardly be well filled except by a gentleman. The word is one the use of which almost subjects one to ignominy. If I say that a judge should be a gentleman or a bishop, I'm met with a scornful allusion to nature's gentleman. Were I to make such an assertion with reference to the House of Commons, nothing that I ever said again would receive the slightest attention. A man in public life could not do himself a greater injury than by saying in public that the commissions in the army or navy or births in the civil service should be given exclusively to gentlemen. He would be defied to define the term, and would fail should he attempt to do so. But he would know what he meant, and so very probably would they who defied him. It may be that the son of a butcher of the village shall become as well fitted for employments requiring gentle culture as the son of the parson, such as often the case. No one has been more prone to give the butcher's son all the welcome he has merited than I myself. But the chances are greatly in favor of the parson's son. The gates of the one class should be open to the other, but neither to the one class nor to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference. The system of competitive examination is, I think, based on a supposition that there is no difference. I got into my place without any examining. Looking back now, I think I can see with accuracy what was then the condition of my own mind and intelligence. Of things to be learned by lessons, I knew almost less than could be supposed possible after the amount of schooling I had received. I could read neither French, Latin, nor Greek. I could speak no foreign language, and I may as well say here as that I never acquired the power of really talking French. I have been able to order my dinner and take a railway ticket, but never got much beyond that. Of the nearest rudiments of the sciences I was completely ignorant. My handwriting was in truth wretched. My spelling was imperfect. There was no subject as to which examination would have been possible on which I could have gone through an examination otherwise then disgracefully. I think I knew more than the average young men of the same rank who began life at nineteen. I could have given a fuller list of the names of the poets of all countries with their subjects and periods, and probably of historians, than many others, and had perhaps a more accurate idea of the manner in which my own country was governed. I knew the names of all the bishops, all the judges, all the heads of colleges, and all the cabinet ministers. Not a very useful knowledge indeed, but I had not been acquired without other matter which was more useful. I had read Shakespeare and Byron and Scott, and could talk about them. The music of the Miltonic line was familiar to me. I had already made at my mind that Pride and Prejudice was the best novel in the English language, a poem which I only partially withdrew after a second reading of Ivanhoe, and did not completely bestow elsewhere till Esmond was written. If I would occasionally break down in my spelling, I could write a letter. If I had a thing to say, I could so say it in written words that the reader should know what I meant, a power which is by no means at the command of all those who come out from the competitive examinations with triumph. Early in life, at the age of fifteen, I had commenced the dangerous habit of keeping a journal, and this I maintained for ten years. The volumes remained in my possession and regarded, never looked at, till eighteen seventy, when I examined them and, with many blushes, destroyed them. They convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, extravagance, and conceit. But they had habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with faculty. I will mention here another habit which had grown upon me from still earlier years, which I myself often regarded with dismay when I thought of the hours devoted to it, but which I suppose must have tended to make me what I have been. As a boy, even as a child, I was thrown much upon myself. I've explained when speaking of my school days how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone, and had to form my plays within myself. Play of some kind was necessary to me then, as it always has been. Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same pale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and propriities and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced. Nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was, of course, my own hero, such as a necessity of castle building. But I never became a king or a duke, much less when my height and personal appearance were fixed could I be an antenus or six feet high. I never was a learned man nor even a philosopher, but I was a very clever person and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart and open of hand and noble in thought, despising mean things, and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since. This had been the occupation of my life for six seven years before I went to the post office and was by no means abandoned when I commenced my work. There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice. But I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination and to live in a world together outside the world of my own material life. And after years I have done the same with this difference that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams and have been able to lay my own identity aside. I must certainly acknowledge that the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service. These seven years were passed in London and during this period of my life it was my duty to be present every morning at the office punctually at 10 a.m. I think I commenced my quarrels with the authorities there by having in my possession a watch which was always ten minutes late. I know that I very soon achieved a character for irregularity and came to be regarded as a black sheep by men around me who were not themselves. I think very good public servants. From time to time rumors reached me that if I did not take care I should be dismissed. Especially one rumor in my early days through my dearly beloved friend Mrs. Clayton Freeling who as I write this is still living and who with tears in her eyes besought me to think of my mother. That was during the life of Sir Francis Freeling who died still in harness a little more than 12 months after I joined the office. And yet the old man showed me signs of almost affectionate kindness writing to me with his own hand more than once from his bed. Sir Francis Freeling was followed at the post office by Colonel Maverly who certainly was not my friend. I do not know that I deserved to find a friend in my new master but I think that a man with better judgment would not have formed so low an opinion of me as he did. Years have gone by and I can write now and almost feel without anger. But I can remember well the keenness of my anguish when I was treated as though I were fit for any useful work. I did struggle not to do the work for there was nothing which was not easy without any struggling but to show that I was willing to do it. My bad character nevertheless stuck to me and was not to be got rid of by any efforts within my power. I do admit that I was irregular. It was not considered to be much in my favor that I could write letters which was mainly the work of our office rapidly correctly and to the purpose. The man who came at ten and who was always still at his desk half past four was preferred before me though when at his desk he might be less efficient. Such preference was no doubt proper but with a little encouragement I also would have been punctual. I got credit for nothing and was reckless. As it was the conduct of some of us was very bad. There was a comfortable sitting room upstairs devoted to the use of someone of our number who in turn was required to remain in the place all night. Hither, one or two of us would adjourn after lunch and play a cart for an hour or two. I do not know whether such ways are possible now in our public offices. And here we used to have suppers and card parties at night, great symposiums with much smoking of tobacco. For in our part of the building there lived a bevy of clerks. These were gentlemen whose duty then was to make up and receive the foreign males. I do not remember that they worked later or earlier than the other sorting clerks but there was supposed to be something special in foreign letters which required that the men who handled them should have minds undistracted by the outer world. Their salaries too were higher than those of their more homely brethren and they paid nothing for their lodgings. Consequently there was a somewhat fast set in those apartments given to cards and to tobacco who drank spirits and water in preference to tea. I was not one of them but was a good deal with them. I do not know that I should interest my readers by saying much of my post office experiences in those days. I was always on the eve of being dismissed and yet was always striving to show how good a public servant I could become if only a chance were given me. But the chance went the wrong way. On one occasion in the performance of my duty I had to put a private letter containing bank notes on the secretary's table which letter I had duly opened as it was not marked private. The letter was seen by the Colonel but had not been moved by him when he left the room. On his return it was gone. In the meantime I had returned to the room again in the performance of some duty. When I was dismissed I was sent for and there I found the Colonel much moved about his letter and a certain chief clerk who with a long face was making suggestions as to the probable fate of the money. The letter has been taken said the Colonel turning to me angrily and by God there has been nobody in the room but you and I. As he spoke he thundered his fist down upon the table. Then said I you have taken it. And I also thundered my fist down but accidentally not upon the table. There was there a standing movable desk at which I presume it was the Colonel's habit to write and on this movable desk was a large bottle full of ink. My fist unfortunately came on the desk and the ink at once flew up covering the Colonel's face and shirt front. Then it was a sight to see that the senior clerk as he seized a quite rushed to the aid of a superior officer striving to mop up the ink and a sight also to see the Colonel in his agony hit right out through the blotting paper at that senior clerk's unoffending stomach. At that moment there came in the Colonel's private secretary with the letter and the money and I was desired to go back to my own room. This was an incident not much in my favor though I did not know that it did me special harm. I was always in trouble. A young woman down in the country had taken it into her head that she would like to marry me and a very foolish young woman she must have been to entertain such a wish. I need not tell that part of the story more at length otherwise than by protesting that no young man in such a position was ever much less to blame than I had been in this. The invitation had come from her and I had lacked the pluck to give it a decided negative but I had left the house within a way without my dinner and had never returned to it. Then there was a correspondence if that can be called a correspondence in which all the letters came from one side. At last the mother appeared at the post office. My hair almost stands on my head now as I remember the figure of the woman walking into the big room in which I sat with six or seven other clerks having a large basket on her arm and an immense bonnet on her head. The messenger had vainly endeavored to persuade her to remain in the enter room. She followed the man in and walking up to the center of the room addressed me in a loud voice. Anthony Trellop when are you going to marry my daughter? We have all had our worst moments and that was one of my worst. I lived through it however and did not marry the young lady. These little incidents were all against me in the office. And then a certain other phase of my private life crept into official view and did me damage. As I shall explain just now I rarely at this time had any money wherewith to pay my bills. In this state of things a certain Taylor had taken from me an acceptance for I think twelve pounds which found its way into the hands of a money lender. With that man who lived in a little street near Mecklenburg Square I formed a most heart-rending but a most intimate acquaintance. In cash I once received from him four pounds. For that and for the original amount of the Taylor's bill which grew monstrously under repeated renewals I paid ultimately something over two hundred pounds. That is so common a story is to be hardly worth the telling but the peculiarity of this man was that he became so attached to me every day at my office. For a long period he founded to be worth his while to walk up those stone steps daily and come and stand behind my chair whispering to me always the same words now I wish you would be punctual if only you would be punctual I should like you to have anything you want. He was a little clean old man who always wore a high starched white cravat inside of which he had a habit of twisting his chin as he uttered his caution. When I remember the constant persistency of his visits I cannot but feel that he was paid very badly for his time in trouble. Those visits were very terrible and can have hardly been of service to me in the office. Of one other misfortune which happened to me in those days I must tell the tale. A junior clerk in the secretary's office was always told off to sleep under and he was supposed to be the presiding genius of the establishment when the other members of the secretary's department had left the building. On an occasion when I was still a little more than a lad perhaps one and twenty years old I was feeling this responsible position. At about seven in the evening word was brought to me that the queen of I think Saxony but I'm sure it was a queen wanted to see the night mail sent out. At this time when there were many mail coaches this was a show and August visitors would sometimes come to see it but preparation was generally made beforehand and some pundit of the office would be at hand to do the honors. On this occasion we were taken by surprise and there was no pundit. I therefore gave the orders and accompanied her majesty around the building walking backwards as I conceived to be proper and often in great peril as I did so down the stairs. I was however quite satisfied with my own matter of performing an unaccustomed and most important duty. There were two old gentlemen with her majesty who no doubt were German barons and an ancient baroness also. They had come and when they had seen the sights took their departure in two glass coaches. As they were preparing to go I saw the two barons consulting together in deep whispers and then as the result of that conversation one of them handed me a half a crown. That also was a bad moment. I came up to town as I said before purporting to live a jolly life upon 90 pounds per annum. I remained seven years in the general post office and when I left it my income was 140 pounds. During the whole of this time I was hopelessly in debt. There were two intervals amounting together to nearly two years I lived with my mother and therefore lived in comfort. But even then I was overwhelmed with debt. She paid much for me paid all that I asked her to pay and all that she could find out that I owed but who in such a condition ever tells all and makes a clean breast of it. The debts of course were not large but I cannot think now how I could have lived and sometimes have enjoyed life with such a burden of guns as I endured. Arif's officers with uncanny documents of which I never understood anything were common attendants on me and yet I did not remember that I was ever locked up though I think I was twice a prisoner. In such emergencies someone paid for me and now looking back at it I have to ask myself whether my youth was very wicked. I did no good in it but was there fair ground for expecting good from me? When I reached London no mode of life was prepared for me no advice even given to me. I went into lodgings and then had to dispose of my time. I belonged to no club and knew very few friends who would receive me into their houses. In such a condition of life a young man should no doubt go home after his work and spend the long hours of the evening reading good books and drinking tea. A lad brought up by strict parents and without having had even a view of other things might perhaps do so. I had passed all my life at public schools where I had seen gay things but had never enjoyed them. Towards the good books and tea no training had been given me. There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice. No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life most certainly prevail with the young man. Of course if the mind be strong enough and the general stuff knitted together of sufficiently stern material the temptations will not prevail. But such minds and material are I think uncommon. The temptation at any rate prevailed with me. I wonder how many young men fall utterly to pieces from being turned loose into London after the same fashion. Mine was I think of all phases of such life the most dangerous. The lad who was sent to mechanical work has longer hours during which he is kept from danger and has not generally been taught in his boyhood to anticipate pleasure. He looks for hard work and grinding the circumstances. I certainly had enjoyed but little pleasure but I had been among those who did enjoy it and were taught to expect it. And I had filled my mind with the ideas of such joys. And now except during official hours I was entirely without control without the influences of any decent household around me. I have said something of the comedy of such life but it certainly had its tragic aspect. Turning it all over in my own mind as I have constantly done in after years the tragedy has always been uppermost. And so it was as the time was passing. Could there be any escape from such dirt? I would ask myself and I always answered that there was no escape. The mode of life was itself wretched. I hated the office. I hated my work. More than all I hated my idleness. I had often told myself since I left school that the only career in life within my reach was that of an author and the only mode of authorship open to me was that of a writer of novels. In the journal which I read and destroyed a few years since, I found the matter argued out before I had been in the post office two years. Parliament was out of the question. I had not means to go to the bar. In official life such as that to which I had been introduced there did not seem to be any opening for real success. Pens and paper I could command. Poetry I did not believe to be within my grasp. The drama too which I would feign have chosen believed to be above me. For history, biography, or essay writing I had not sufficient erudition. But I thought it possible that I might write a novel. I had resolved very early that in that shape must the attempt be made. But the months and years ran on and no attempt was made and yet no day was passed without thoughts of attempting and a mental acknowledgement of the disgrace of postponing it. What reader will not understand the agony of remorse produced by such a condition of mind? The gentleman from Mecklenburg Square was always with me in the morning, always angering me by his hateful presence. But when the evening came I could make no struggle towards getting rid of him. In those days I read a little and did learn to read French and Latin. I made myself familiar with Horace and became acquainted with the works of our own greatest poets. I had my strong enthusiasm and remember throwing out of the window in Northumberland Street where I lived a volume of Johnson's lives of the poets because he spoke sneeringly of Lycadus. That was Northumberland Street by the Marleybone Workhouse. On to the back door of which establishment my room looked out, a most dreary abode at which I fancy I must have almost ruined the good-natured lodging housekeeper by my constant inability to pay her what I owed. How I got my daily bread I can hardly remember. But I do remember that I was often unable to get myself a dinner. Young men generally now had their meals provided for them. I kept house as it were. Every day I had to find myself with the day's food. For my breakfast I could get some credit at the lodgings though that credit would frequently come to an end. But for all that I had often breakfast to pay day by day and at your eating house the credit is not given. I had no friends on whom I could sponge regularly. Out on the Fulham Road I had an uncle but his house was four miles from the post office and almost as far from my own lodgings. Then came borrowings of money sometimes absolute want and almost constant misery. Before I tell how it came about that I left this wretched life I must say a word or two of the friendships which lessened my misfortunes. My earliest friend in life was John Merivale with whom I had been at school at Sunbury and Harrow and who was a nephew of my tutor Harry Drury. Herman Merivale who afterwards became my friend was his brother as is also Charles Merivale the historian and dean of Ely. I knew John when I was ten years old and I'm happy to be able to say that he is going to dine with me one day this week. I did not injure his character by stating that in those days I lived very much with him. He too was in Pecunius but he had a home in London and knew but little of the sort of penury which I endured. For more than fifty years he and I have been close friends and then there was one W.A. whose misfortunes in life will not permit me to give his full name but whom I dearly loved. I was very much in love with Oxford and at both places had fallen into trouble. He then became a schoolmaster or perhaps I'd better say Usher and finally he took orders but he was unfortunate in all things and died some years ago in poverty. He was most perverse bashful to very fear of a lady's dress unable to restrain himself in anything but yet with a conscience that was always stinging him and very quarrelsome and perhaps of all men I have known the most humorous and he was entirely unconscious of his own humor. He did not know that he could so handle all matters as to create infinite amusement out of them. Poor W.A. to him there came no happy turning point at which life loomed seriously on him and then became prosperous. W.A. Meraville and I formed a little club the Tramp Society and subjected to certain rules in obedience to which we wandered on foot about the county's adjacent to London. Southampton was the furthest point we ever reached but Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were more dear to us. These were the happiest hours of my life then and perhaps not the least innocent although we were frequently in peril from the village authorities whom we outraged. Not to pay for any conveyance, never to spend above five shillings a day to obey all orders from the elected ruler of the hour. This enforced under heavy fines were among our statutes. I would faint tell here some of our adventures how A. enacted an escaped madman and we his pursuing keepers and so got ourselves a lift in a cart from which we ran away as we approached the lunatic asylum. How we returned out of a little town at night and spoke frightened by the loudness of our mirth and how we once crept into a hayloft and were wakened in the dark morning by a pitchfork and how the juvenile owner of that pitchfork fled through the window when he heard the complaints of the wounded man. But the fun was the fun of W.A. and would cease to be fun as told by me. It was during these years that John Tilly who has now been for many years the permanent senior officer of the post office who married my sister whom he took with him into Cumberland where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He's been my friend for more than 40 years as has also Peregrine Birch a clerk in the House of Lords who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and dearest friends of my life and I can thank God that three of them are still alive. When I had been nearly seven years in the secretary's office of the post office always hating my position there and yet always fearing that I should be dismissed from it there came a day of escape. There had laterally been created in the service a new body of officers called Surveyor's Clerks. There were at that time seven surveyors in England, two in Scotland and three in Ireland. To each of these officers a clerk had been lately attached was to travel about the country under the Surveyor's orders. There had been much doubt among the young men in the office whether they should or should not apply for these places. The emoluments were good and the work alluring but there was at first supposed to be something derogatory in the position. There was a rumor that the first Surveyor who got a clerk sent the clerk out to fetch his beer and that another had called upon his clerk to send the linen to the wash. However, a conviction that nothing could be worse than the birth of a Surveyor's Clerk in Ireland. The clerks were all appointed however. To me it had not occurred to ask for anything nor would anything have been given me. But after a while there came a report from the far west of Ireland that the man sent there was absurdly incapable. It was probably thought then that none but a man absurdly incapable would go on such a mission to the west of Ireland. When the report reached the London office I was the first to read it. I was at that time in dire trouble having debts on my head and quarrels with our secretary Colonel and a full conviction that my life was taking me downwards to the lowest pits. So I went to the Colonel boldly and volunteered for Ireland if he would send me. He was glad to be so rid of me and I went. This happened in August 1841 when I was 26 years old. My salary in Ireland was to be but 100 pounds a year. But I was to receive 15 shillings a day for every day that I was away from home and six pence for every mile that I travelled. The same allowances were made in England but at that time travelling in Ireland was done at half the English prices. My income in Ireland after paying my expenses became at once 400 pounds. This was the first good fortune of my life.