Mount TBR #41

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Belton Estate – Anthony Trollope

This stand-alone novel was serialized in the Fortnightly Review from May 1865 to January 1866. It was published in three volumes, to Trollope’s anger, since he wanted it in only two volumes. Greedy damn publishers!

The Belton estate is entailed to Charles Amedroz. Charles parties like it’s 1899 in London while his father Bernard and sister Clara in rural Somerset sit home and worry. Debt and humiliation and one too many blistering hangovers drive Charles to do away with himself. The entail discriminates in favor of males of course and passes the legacy on to Will Belton, well-off Norfolk farmer, paragon of hearty manliness, as spontaneous and down to earth as he could be.

Bernard Amedroz is a comic neurotic who feels it “quite heartless” for Will to be wanting to visit Belton, express his condolences, and offer to help his relations.

Everything that everybody did around him he would call heartless. The man pitied himself so much in his own misery, that he expected to live in an atmosphere of pity from others; and though the pity doubtless was there, he misdoubted it. He thought that Farmer Stovey was cruel in that he had left the hay-cart near the house, to wound his eyes by reminding him that he was no longer master of the ground before his own hall door. He thought that the women and children were cruel to chatter so near his ears. He almost accused his daughter of cruelty, because she had told him that she liked the contiguity of the hay-making. Under such circumstances as those which enveloped him and her, was it not heartless in her to like anything? It seemed to him that the whole world of Belton should be drowned in woe because of his misery.

During the visit, impetuous Will naturally falls in love with distant cousin Clara whose spirit and intelligence attract him. Clara, however – always a looming “however” in a Trollope love story – has decided to marry the more eligible but dull Capt. Frederic Aylmer, an MP though not the first son.

Aylmer’s mama takes a scalding dislike to Clara, seeing as how penniless no-name Clara brings neither money nor title to the marriage with Fred. Besides the calculated snubbing, the Aylmer style is cold, formal, and stifling, not a clan that the self-respecting Clara could possibly fit into.

Clara is also in a bad position because her aunt has not left her a shilling but granted her entire estate to Capt. Aylmer. The aunt has, in fact, extracted a death-bed promise from the Captain to ask Clara to marry him. Trollope calls the aunt, “one of those women who have always believed that their own sex is in every respect inferior to the other.” Clara has religious differences with her low church Aunt which she has not been shy about expressing to her aunt, feeling it would be hypocritical to hide her convictions.

The reviewers bashed this story when it was put between covers in 1866. In print a young Henry James called it “stupid.” Always modest about his writing skills like Somerset Maugham, Trollope himself bowed to critical opinion and said in his autobiography, “It will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist.” In our day, readers seem to concur, with only two reviews by hard-core book challenge readers like us (here and here). Per my unsystematic observations at countless used book sales and stores since the early 1970s, I’ve seen this book only once.

Snobbish to read what virtually nobody else reads, I snapped up The Belton Estate and read it. Only to find the plot minimal, the comedy negligible, and the characters type-cast. Everybody’s motive is sensible (if awkward at times), their behavior plausible. Trollope goes out on a limb by encouraging us readers to sympathize with Mrs. Askerton, who left a hopeless drunk of a husband in India, lived with a man as his mistress for five years, then married the man when her husband finally drank himself to death. Trollope also sympathizes with the lot of Clara, who is boxed in by conventions of law and custom that force her into poverty and a wretched life in which she can bring no benefit to anybody. There are some very good passages, like this one that kicked off Chapter 25:

Clara felt herself to be a coward as the Aylmer Park carriage, which had been sent to meet her at the station, was drawn up at Sir Anthony Aylmer's door. She had made up her mind that she would not bow down to Lady Aylmer, and yet she was afraid of the woman. As she got out of the carriage, she looked up, expecting to see her in the hall; but Lady Aylmer was too accurately acquainted with the weights and measures of society for any such movement as that. Had her son brought Lady Emily to the house as his future bride, Lady Aylmer would probably have been in the hall when the arrival took place; and had Clara possessed ten thousand pounds of her own, she would probably have been met at the drawing-room door; but as she had neither money nor title,—as she in fact brought with her no advantages of any sort, Lady Aylmer was found stitching a bit of worsted, as though she had expected no one to come to her. And Belinda Aylmer was stitching also,—by special order from her mother. The reader will remember that Lady Aylmer was not without strong hope that the engagement might even yet be broken off. Snubbing, she thought, might probably be efficacious to this purpose, and so Clara was to be snubbed.

“Weights and measures of society” – too right, Mr. Trollope. Sorry as I am to say, the novel is run of the mill. Near the conclusion I was reminded of Wilkie Collins’ formula, “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” Brought home was the truth that Trollope, like Erle Stanley Gardner, was operating a fiction factory, churning out serials in a time when print was the main outlet for thinking entertainment.

When the resulting fiction-artifact shines and smoothly ticks by giving us the rush a good novel stokes, we feel no misgivings being satisfied consumers of it. But when product fails to sparkle due to flat prose or stretched length, reader patience is taxed and developments such as Clara’s letter to “brother” Will just seem capricious. “Tarnation, perverse Lily Dale again.” As I read the last quarter of The Belton Estate, I wondered to myself, “What lack in me, what sloth of mind, keeps me turning the pages to discover the fates of these people, fates I can guess tolerably easily and won’t remember by Christmas.” I never thought such a self-accusatory thing near the climaxes of The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He was Right.