The interested reader needs to know that some of us were now reading Thomas Hardy's Master of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure while we were reading Dr Thorne.

To Trollope-l

November 1, 1999

Re: Dr Thorne, Chs 24-27: The Strong Dramatic Scenes Continue (I)

The strong scenes continue. The subject matter of this week's first two chapters (24-27) is death. Trollope gives us a number of perspectives on this man which deepen our response to his death.

First, he regrets deeply what has happened to his son, but can do nothing about it. Indeed, he half- realises that the man his son has become is the result of things beyond his reach. Trollope captures perfectly the mood of someone near death, and shows us that real kindness to such a person is to take seriously what they have to say and respond to it -- as Sir Roger's son does not. The restrained prosaic nature of the dialogues in these scenes between Sir Roger, his son and wife, and then Sir Roger and Dr Thorne is remarkably appropriate to theme and reality. The words are not stylised yet figure forth more than Sir Roger is conscious of or his case as an individual:

'"You ain't worth a shilling, and yet you regret nothing. I am worth half a million in one way or the other, and I regret everything -- everything -- everything ... Thorne, believe me, when a man's heart is sad -- sad -- sad to the core, a few words from a parson at the last moment will never make it all right' (Houghton Mifflin Dr Thorne, ed EBowen, Ch 25, p. 267).

On Victoria this past week there has been a thread on death in the Victorian period. As A. O. J. Cockshut has pointed out, what is remarkable about death scenes in Trollope is how he does not draw out the moment of death in an unreal pious-maudlin way with the dying blessing all, going to heaven, and the novelist pulling out every stop so that we grieve at a loss that the text is sedulous to avoid. These deaths are all fake, as death is mostly painful, often ugly, easiest when it happens in the wee hours of the morning while the person sleeps. Trollope skips over the actual death and gives us the realistic leading up to it, and the aftermath as experienced by those who must now cope on alone.

Trollope does get a sharp comic perspective through his many references to the wonderful obituary which was all ready to put in the newspapers the next day. Why people love such lies would require a tough answer. Trollope wants us to compare the real man, the real death, with this emblem of upbeat prosperity and success measured just by money and fame. Money and fame it is assumed have given Sir Roger what would be dearest to his heart. We see otherwise. In case we don't 'get it', just after we are told Sir Roger is dead, Trollope returns us to the public face Sir Roger himself helped present to the world in the form of a monument erected to him

in which he was portrayed as smoothing a block of granite with a mallet and chisel; while his eagle eye, disdaining such humble work, was fixed upon some intricate mathematical instrument above him. Could Sir Roger have seen it himself, he would probably have declared, that no workman was ever worth his salt who looked one way while he rowed another (Ch 25, p. 268).

Trollope was not personally a snob and could in his fiction rise above caste definitions of people. The dignity with which Lady Scatcherd's paradoxical grief for a man who never treated her with the respect and affection she deserved privately is another instance of Trollope's freedom from snobbery as an artist when his sympathetic imagination and ethical stance brings forth his best scenes.

Ellen Moody

Re: Dr Thorne, Chs 24-27: The Strong Dramatic Scenes Continue: Dr Thorne and Pride and Prejudice, Parallels Between the Central Married Couples (II)

The subject matter of the second two chapters (28-29) may be said to be spite and jealousy arising out of personal resentment and caste arrogance. Perhaps this is worse than death as death can only happen once to someone in his life; I have seen people behave again and again just like Lady Arabella towares her daughter and her husband.

Trollope has a gift in this book for keeping each of his character individualised. He does not stylise or pattern their conversations. I suggest it's the narrator's own wording, his nuances which lead us to generalise and see such scenes as typifying. Here Trollope means to shows us a woman manoeuvring and bullying her family members so as to prevent them from sustaining contact with someone who gives them one of the pleasures of their existence. The tension of the scenes derives from the reality that it is a deprivation for Beatrice to give up Mary; it is a real grief to the squire to give up his one male friend.

Such things are not petty matters. As someone who has seen the same motives of spite, jealousy and a desire to dominate and control work out in exactly the same way not only in my own family but in families of others I don't find it petty -- or unimportant. Lady Arabella has the right to control Beatrice (her daughter), she has the egoism and denseness to make the life of her husband miserable simply by virtue of her own proximity. People may come away from this book wondering why Lady Arabella is made to seem so unpleasant, so awful: it is through scenes like this which in their petty squalid jealousy of everyday life hit home.

Trollope is very smart in how he presents the relationship between Lady Arabella and the Squire. It is sometimes thought that the dominating person in a relationship is the one who makes the most money, is the smartest, seems loudest and strongest: I beg to differ. It is more probably those who have what it takes to keep up meannness and unpleasantness until they have their own way. I remember Henry Tilney about what few holds on happiness we have.

In this connection it's interesting to compare Trollope's Gresham couple with Austen's Mr and Mrs Bennet. In many ways the two couples are similar types and are miserable in marriage -- well the male is -- for similar reasons. At the end of this novel Lady Arabella's turn-around in front of Mary exactly recalls of Mrs Bennet: Austen so exaggerates Mrs Bennet's sudden pathetic sycophancy in front of Darcy after 'hating' him all novel long, that we laugh at the absurdity of it; presented in the toned-down real way of Lady Arabella suddenly telling Mary how much she valued her (for herself of course) all along, we get the real ethical meanness of such behavior.

Last week I pointed to a couple of parallels between the Bennets and the Greshams in which the old Squire seemed to be as strong as Mr Bennet; not here. The Squire wishes he could have his room to himself; he apparently hasn't got enough force of personality to make this woman leave his library; Mr Bennet has no trouble with pushing nagging unpleasant intruders out. Lady Arabella is worse than Mrs Bennet for she wants her husband to avoid central solaces of his existence. She never forgets to say it was his hunting ruined them. People are like this, and such little things poison lives. Trollope does this oh so quietly; he leaves us to feel and think and understand.

In a recent The New York Review of Books (Vol 46, No 14), there was an abridgement of a talk Tom Stoppard gave at the New York Public Library (on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue). Towards the end Stoppard quoted a paragraph from a play by James Saunders, Next Time I'll Sing to You. This week's four chapters are on the irretrievability of time and death in the Scatcherd household, and on the weakness of two people before the determined meanness of a third. The quality of feeling with which Trollope presents these scenes is caught in Saunders's words:

There lies behind everything, and you can believe this or not as you wish, a certain quality which we may call grief. It's always there, just under the surface, just behind the façade, sometimes very nearly exposed, so that you can dimly see the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental pond on a still day, the dark, gross, inhuman outline of a carp gliding slowly past; when you realise suddenly that the carp were always there below the surface, even while the water sparkled in the sunshine, and while you patronised the quaint ducks and the supercilious swans, the carp were there, unseen. It bides its time, this quality. And if you do catch a glimpse of it, you may pretend not to notice or you may turn suddenly away and romp with your children on the grass, laughing for no reason. The name of this quality is grief.

The Lady Arabella is partly also driven by caste arrogance to act this way. This makes the scenes more true to life -- from what I've seen. It's the difference in caste that makes the others give up their friends. Oeople who act like Lady Arabella create by hard feelings towards them in those they make miserable in this way. Make no mistake about that.

All the more then does Dr Thorne emerge as a hero in these two scenes. The anti-caste arrogance theme, somewhat paradoxically swirls about Dr Thorne even here: for Dr Thorne insists on Lady Scatcherd's worth, value as a woman. When Sir Roger lays daying, Dr Thorne treats him as a man who is not as good as dead, who we can say smooth things too and dismiss as he's not going to be round much longer. One cannot imagine Dr Thorne treating anyone with more intimate consideration and tact than he does Sir Rogert.

To turn to Dr Thorne and Lady Arabella (Ch 26, 'War'), when Lady Arabella confronts him, he responds to her with real truth. Actually this is really nervy. Most people who part their family members from others rely on pressuring the family member, and don't go forth to the one to be cut and snubbed. This is a measure of Lady Arabella's sense of herself as some sort of Queen. The doctor asks -- and surprised the dense woman, another factor in her daring to come is her denseness -- Why should his niece not marry Frank? Dr Thorne does not let any of Lady Arabella's aspersions pass by without countering them. Frank is lucky to get her.

Again I am reminded of Austen's Pride and Prejudice When the arrogant bully Lady Catherine de Bourgh tells Elizabeth if she marries Darcy, the 'shades of Pemberly' will be polluted, Elizabeth says, Why? He is a gentleman and I am a gentleman's daughter. Elizabeth denies that Darcy's relatives have any right to have any say in the matter of who he marries if he doesn't allow it; they certainly have no right to tell what to do in such a private matter. People are here valued as individuals, not counters in a game of aggrandisement who belong to other people who can make their will felt by means of power in their hands right now. The doctor goes farther than Elizabeth by talking of Mary's inner nature. When Lady Arabella begins again to accuse by insinuation, he counters that his niece has done nothing wrong, and is to be punished because forsooth, Frank is the Heir, the title, and if he can marry Money, will be high on the caste hierarchy. The final peroration releases our feelings which are pent up elsewhere:

'"It never occurs to you to tie him up, to put him in prison. No ... ' (Ch 26, p. 277).

The implication: what is so special about Frank, that the misery of others is nothing to it? Or is it something special about Frank that Lady Arabella is so concerned about? Is it herself? Where does her reality lie? In what is her stupid pride founded?

Nonetheless, Lady Arabella does have her way. Mary is to be publicly shamed and humiliated. Everyone will see she is to be avoided like something contagious. The squire is left to brood alone.

Trollope plumbs some depths of in what we mistakenly call sheer social feeling in Dr Thorne as he does not in Barchester Towers. These are similarly explored in the scenes in the family of the Earl of Cashel and between the Kellys, Anty Lynch and her brother, Barry in The Kellys and O'Kellys, and also in the story of Alaric Tudor in The Three Clerks. If I were to match the achievement of Dr Thorne with a previous novel, I would not place it besides either Barchester book, but besides The Kellys and O'Kellys and The Three Clerks.

PS: I do not mean to suggest that The Warden hasn't depths of feeling, but I see in it a tragic patterning, the emotion is about something peculiarly not seen in the social world very much. The pattern in The Warden has some analogies with the way Trollope characterises Thady Macdermot in The Macdermots of Ballycloran, a great tragic novel -- which I forgot about when I was trying to think of that odd species of novel, the tragic one.

Cheers to all
Ellen Moody

From: "Angela Richardson"

Re: Dr Thorne and Wives and Daughters

I keep thinking about Gaskell's Wives and Daughters when I read Dr Thorne. The Dr and his daughter Mary remind me very much of Dr Gibson and his daughter Molly. Both have aristocratic families living near them and the plot includes the exploration of a romance between the Drs daughter and a son of the aristocratic family. Gaskell wrote her novel in 1866, several years after Dr Thorne.

Angela

To Trollope-l

November 2, 1999

Re: Dr Thorne: Fathers and Daughters, Fringe Gentry

I also find myself remembering Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. The reality in both is that a doctor was not considered quite gentry; he was almost just below, partly because his was a trade: he used his hands; he lived on an earned income; he would probably have little estate (Roger Hamley is the younger son in Wives and Daughters). Yet he was by education and probably temperament a gentleman, and his children would mingle with the children of his customers.

Like George Eliot in Middlemarch, both novelists are aware of the new currents in medicine. No one is bleeding anyone here. It's a matter of diagnosis and doing no harm. Dr Thorne is a practical man, and not quite up to the science of Lydgate, so he is still selling compounds. He hasn't the conflict that modern doctors share with Lydate: the patient wants a magic bullet for the money. Gaskell's Gibson seems to be somewhere inbetween in his knowledge, but his behavior is more like Thorne's. Hamley himself is a type of Darwin. (Darwin was only one of many naturalists to travel into geologically unexplored areas and come back and write about it with new theses about science.)

We could generalise out though to another pattern which poets and playwrights and opera composers are fond of because it touches people: the older father and daughter. Think of all the father-daughter pairs at the center of Shakespeare's plays; in Verdi's operas (Rigoletto comes to mind). As a pair, perhaps father and daughter is less charged as we assume the man will be in control; a mother and son can be used to create tension in readers which derives from her assumption of authority over him. I also wonder if the tenderness of the woman is less charged because assumed; when there is a sexual interaction between them noticeable readers become uncomfortable. It is even worse if there is some sexual jealousy in the father image, but here we have an uncle. The relationship is at one remove; we have the father so tender and loving and yet not sexually involved. The reader can enjoy emotions without the criss-cross of sexual aggression or exploitation. Again Drs Thorne and Gibson both are not mercenary; they want their daughters to marry respectable men who will care for them, to be safe,a and comfortable, but neither would push their daughter into marriage for aggrandisement or to get a better position (as the Dean in Is He Popenjoy? clearly pushes his daughter, Mary). One can see from a number of points of view why this pattern is popular.

One thread in the novel which we are to respond to is the continual separation inflicted on Dr Thorne and Mary because Mary is getting in the way of the Greshams and because others feel she ought to get out of their way. Shall she stay to be so obviously made a pariah of? So the doctor must sit over his fire alone, come home from work to drink his tea alone.

Re: Dr Thorne, Ch 27: Miss Thorne Goes on a Visit

This week's chapters end on Mary and her aunt. Now Mary doesn't know that Lady Scatcherd is her aunt, and Trollope doesn't emphasise it. It's curious how instinctively Trollope keeps Mary's bastardy off-stage: she's Miss Thorne not Miss Scatcherd. Mary wants to pay Lady Scatcherd great respect because Lady Scatcherd is a widow, older, such a deeply honest soul herself, but Lady Scatcherd refuses herself to acknowledge her position. The scenes are comic and touching, but does no one feel uncomfortable? Trollope is so obviously on the side of Lady Scatcherd's humbling herself in this way before Mary. This proves it seems what a good woman Lady Scatcherd is. In other contexts Trollope will argue that everyone is ambitious, and if we praise those who are not, we are hypocrites.

Ellen Moody

November 4, 1999

Re: Dr Thorne, Ch 24: We Meet Louis Scatcherd: Crass Class Bias

I saved for a separate posting what in this week's chapters I'd like to criticise unfavorably. While there are elements in Trollope's portrait of Louis Scatcherd which show Trollope to regard him as a human being whose circumstances and nature are worthy serious sympathy and understanding, by and large Trollope has deliberately given Louis traits that will disgust or make us despise him so that he, Trollope, can reinforce the hierarchy of his day which supported him. It may be said why should we not simply accept or not bring up the distasteful arguments on behalf of castes, sexual differentiation of women, irresponsible private property, and so on. I answer, because these things are built into our culture still today; they are not obsolete. Not to point them out is to suggest it's okay and thus reinforce the inequities of our society which cause so much misery. With respect to Trollope, when one is defending a novelist against those who say he is second-rate for all sorts of things, it's wise to admit wherein the arguments against him are cogent: he does not say of all human beings, there but for the Luck of the Draw go I.

One of the things I find refreshing about Hardy is that when he creates a character, he does not do so in order to reinforce castes or snobbery or indifference between people. I agree with Duffy that we are to respect and empathise with Michael Henchard; when Hardy criticises a character as having done wrong, it is not because the character figures forth a low caste or even has an unsympathetic nature; it's because that character knowingly and for utterly selfish reasons that have no circumstances to justify it, does harm to another. Henchard never deliberately does harm to others. The faultline in Hardy is not who you are but what you do to others. Hardy does not reinforce the inhumanity of his characters to one another based on their class or sexual vulnerability.

Trollope's portrait of Louis is softened at the edges because in it he takes account of how not fitting into a caste can twist people. Louis overacts his part with other people because he is uncomfortable. He is also despised by other people, and this is partly what makes him have his mean and low view of humanity. He only gets to consort with those who want to con or use him. He is also not given anything to do commensurate with what are his abilities. Trollope has of course created a character who would not understand anything but money, bullying, cheating, and indulging our animal appetites. It is this deliberate yoking of a low character with a low status that is at the heart of the distastefulness of the portrait: people of who come from parents of originally low status who find themselves placed with those supposedly above them can as often be finer, more sensitive, more intelligent people than their supposed 'betters'. But it is not to Trollope's purpose to create such a character.

No. His purpose is to make us ultimately dismiss the Louis Scatcherds of society as human beings. Perhaps the core of this kind of thinking is categorisation of people, seeing them as examples of positions (the same thinking lies behind racism). So as narrator he reinforces and assumes we will agree with the following kinds of statements:

[Louis] had more pocket-money than any other lad in the school, and was possessed also of a certain effrontery which carried him ahead among boys of his own age. He gained, therefore a degree of _éclat_ even among those who knew, and very frequently said to each other, that young Scatcherd was not fit to be their companion, except on such open occasions as those of cricket matches and boat- races. Boys, in this respect, are at least as exclusive as men, and understand as well the difference between an inner and an outer circle. Scatcherd had many companions at school who were glad enough to go up to Maidenhead with him in his boat; but there was not one among them who would have talked to him of his sister (Houghton Mifflin Dr Thorne, ed EBowen, Ch, 24, p. 251).

Again, Louis shines with 'a ghastly glare':

The very lads who had eaten his father's dinners at Eton, and shared his four-oar at Eton, knew much better than to associate with him at Cambridge now that they had put on the toga virilis (Ch 24, p. 251).

Why? Are we told anything of the inner nature of these boys who of course would not dream of Louis Scatcherd marrying their sister which tells us they are superior to him? In what does their superiority consist? Oh, I misphrased it: in Trollopian language, it would be 'dream of such as Louis Scatcherd ...' There's a lot in that 'such as' which in modern language would be 'people like' so-and-so. And the like refers to his class, who his parents were, nothing in him. Trollope doesn't even bother to present the other boys as having anything in their inner nature which is finer in any way than Louis's.

The mitigation of the portrait comes when Trollope tries to explain how Louis has become the man of vile tastes, low mores, and mercenary and inhumane values by saying he didn't fit in, he wasn't given respect by people above him, nor anything to do which could gain respect of those below him. But the truth is Trollope need not have made Louis what he is. It is Trollope who deliberately created a distasteful man so as to make us feel distaste towards anyone who gets out of his place. It is of course Trollope who reinforces castes.

The incident where we were asked to applaud someone beating up someone else was a one-shot deal. Trollope sanitised that for us by presenting the man who beat up the other as a noble soul -- though in reality such customs favor the rougher, coarses types who like to bait people and thrive on such mores. He then dismissed Mr Moffat from the scene. The problem here needs to be addressed as the character is central to the plot. By presenting Louis as someone we will be relieved to get rid of, as a nasty-minded embarrassment, Trollope can kill him off easily and provide the happy ending. The great irony of the book is that the bastard Mary=money. Frank gets to marry money by marrying Mary. We do see the ambivalence of Trollope's attitude as he manages to jeer at people who say they care so much about blood and heritage. However, we could not be happy for the characters if we cared about the death of Louis. We must be made to see him as a gnome, misfit, as subhuman, thus, somewhat contradictorily, reinforcing the caste system whose real basis -- money -- has been so neatly exposed. I suppose these kinds of contradictions are part of the basis people use who criticise Trollope by saying he doesn't think out deeply what he is presenting to us.

We have brought up earlier in the physical presentation of Obadiah Slope how red hair seems to English people to be used again and again to denote someone as ugly, or unacceptable. Trollope made his Colonel Stubbs a red-head -- though of course overendowing his nature with nobility, gentleness, perception, a complete lack of caste arrogance and mercenary worldliness, of any desire to triumph over others by ostentatious uncomfortable display. Still Trollope made him a red-head because he assumes we will find this disgusting. Louis too is given red hair, or reddish. We are also told he has pale- coloured skin, is small. Apparently this too is a no no, a sign of Louis's not being that wonderful alpha male we have in our Frank who we are told is just 'a picture of health and strength', most 'manly in appearance' (Ch 24, p. 250). Louis also has a nasal accent, slightly American. When David Case reads the part aloud, Case drawls Louis's speech with a nasal version of American vowels. It grates on the nerves.

As someone who has suffered and all my life seen others suffer from the kind of inhumane coarse attitudes which lie behind this portrait of Louis, I deplore it. On C18-l the other day, a woman asked, Why when people see me for an interview, they immediately offer me a job as an adjunct. My dear, I could have told her, they know. They recognise who is their fit companion and who is not. What school did you go to? Who wrote your letters? The use of anti-semitism by Trollope in other of his novels is subject to the same charge: if only such attitudes were obsolete and anachronistic, they wouldn't matter. But in middle Europe recently and right now in Africa people of one ethnic group went about murdering the other ethnic group. Why? They could tell who was subhuman and needed a lesson.

Ellen Moody

From: "Howard Merkin"

I think that Ellen is unfair on Trollope in suggesting that he gave Louis traits that will make us despise him so that he, Trollope, can reinforce his own social position. He has never written in that manner before, and I cannot see why he should be accused of doing so now.

Louis has been spoilt and indulged by his parents, especially his father, and has been given no real opportunity to utilise the very great advantages that his father's title and money might have given him. The result is that he has become an ignorant drunk, without any redeeming features. This is the character that Trollope has drawn, not because he despised someone who comes from working class stock, but because he needed an obstacle to Mary Thorne's future prospects to create the main plot of his novel, and to have a means of resolving it. After all, Mary comes at least half from the same stock, but she has been brought up and educated as a young lady, whereas Louis has not been brought up at all, or educated with any degree of success.

It is clear that Trollope was quite positive about the difference between 'birth' and 'breeding'. The inhabitants of Courcy Castle undoubtedly had birth, but they appeared to have no sort of breeding at all. There is the dreadful Earl and Countess, their appalling son, Lord Porlock, the other two sons who had little to recommend them, and the bevy of awful daughters. I don't see how this portrayal can be described as 'reinforcing the hierarchy of his day which supported him'.

If Trollope had been going to write The Trials and Triumphs of Louis Scatcherd, we might have had an interesting novel, but we certainly would not have had Doctor Thorne. I am prepared to settle for what we have got.

Howard

Michael Powe responded to Howard and me

Subject: Re: [trollope-l] Louis Scatcherd

Mike quoted Howard:

"I think that Ellen is unfair on Trollope in suggesting that he gave Louis traits that will make us despise him so that he, Trollope, can reinforce his own social position. He has never written in that manner before, and I cannot see why he should be accused of doing so now."

Of the books I've read, Trollope's most direct assault on the character of the 'low-born' is in his portrayal of Daniel Thwaite in Lady Anna. I don't think there can be any doubt that Trollope could be extremely classist in his views.

Yes, he makes a distinction between the well-behaved and the ill-behaved in the upper classes. However, that does not counteract the fact that in his books, for the most part, servants are not real people and they almost never deserve better than they get.

Then he quoted Howard again:

"Louis has been spoilt and indulged by his parents, especially his father, and has been given no real opportunity to utilise the very great advantages that his father's title and money might have given him. The result is that he has become an ignorant drunk, without any redeeming features. This is the character that Trollope has drawn, not because he despised someone who comes from working class stock, but because he needed an obstacle to Mary Thorne's future prospects to create the main plot of his novel, and to have a means of resolving it. After all, Mary comes at least half from the same stock, but she has been brought up and educated as a young lady, whereas Louis has not been brought up at all, or educated with any degree of success."

One of Trollope's redeeming features is that he could draw on a well of humanitarianism. In his quest for realism, he frequently draws portraits of life that are discomfitting even to him. He may have been anti-semitic; but at the same time, he clearly saw and regretted the mistreatment of Jews in English society. He seems to have abhorred violence and yet, over and over again, we see an undercurrent of violence in his portrait of English society -- from Ruby Ruggles getting her hair pulled to Signora Neroni getting thrown down the stairs. (Again, though, note that while the violence against Ruby is fully confronted, the violence against Madeleine takes place offstage and only is hinted at. A matter of class.) The conversations that take place between Emily and Nora in He Knew He Was Right, in which they discuss the status of a woman in English society, are amazingly forthright. Yet, there's no doubt that at the end of the day, Trollope plumped for the husband and for the status quo.

mp

To Trollope-l

November 4, 1999

Re: Dr Thorne, Chs 24: We Meet Louis Scatcherd

Dear Howard, I meant that Trollope produces such a portrait because it implicitly reinforces his social position. Were Trollope not himself a gentleman, he would not sneer at those who are just beneath. It's by implication, and in criticism of Trollope this is often what is meant when it is said Trollope supports the establishment of which he is part.

Howard didn't respond to the other part of my commentary. I agreed that personally the portrait of Louis hangs together. But repeatedly Trollope uses wording which shows that others simply by looking at Louis and recognising his place on the hierarchy would not allow their sisters near him. They knew he is not a fit companion. I'll repost the exact words:

"[Louis] had more pocket-money than any other lad in the school, and was possessed also of a certain effrontery which carried him ahead among boys of his own age. He gained, therefore a degree of éclat even among those who knew, and very frequently said to each other, that young Scatcherd was not fit to be their companion, except on such open occasions as those of cricket matches and boat- races. Boys, in this respect, are at least as exclusive as men, and understand as well the difference between an inner and an outer circle. Scatcherd had many companions at school who were glad enough to go up to Maidenhead with him in his boat; but there was not one among them who would have talked to him of his sister (Houghton Mifflin Dr Thorne, ed EBowen, Ch, 24, p. 251).

This is awful. Trollope presents Scatcherds this way because they comes from a lower class group. It's not just that he is imitating social realities; he approves of them. And then again:

The very lads who had eaten his father's dinners at Eton, and shared his four-oar at Eton, knew much better than to associate with him at Cambridge now that they had put on the toga virilis (Ch 24, p. 251).

Why? Are we told anything of the inner nature of these boys who of course would not dream of Louis Scatcherd marrying their sister which tells us they are superior to him? In what does their superiority consist? What do they have that Louis hasn't. Has Trollope shown them to be morally superior, intelligent, hard-working, earnest, sensitive, anything at all but above Louis in class implicitly. Trollope doesn't even bother to present the other boys as having anything in their inner nature which is finer in any way than Louis's.

If this isn't caste arrogance from within, I don't know what is. And it is akin to the way Trollope presents Ferdinand Lopez and Obadiah Slope. Trollope wants us to despise Louis because it suits not only the purposes of his plot but also because it suits his theme: people ought not to get above their place. Look at that wonderful humble woman, Lady Scatcherd. We are to like her because she abases herself before Mary and anyone she assumes is 'better' than she. Better in what way, pray tell?

It is wrong. It is inhumane. And we ought not to look over it as if it's not there. Especially as such attitudes are with us still and make for great unhappiness.

Re: Caste Arrogance, Bullying and Intimidation

One more:

To be plainer about last week's discussion, I dislike the bullying because society still runs on levels of intimidation based on one's class rank. To be honest, I identify with those beneath the hammer and the sneer and those in whom tremulousness has been instilled.

Ellen