For a More Fun Election, Read Trollope. (Really).

Dr Thorne and its wonderful antihero

For anyone weary of 21^st century election campaigns let me recommend a fictional alternative.

It takes place in the mid nineteenth century and is part of a Very Long Victorian Novel called Dr Thorne. Now I’m not usually a big fan of Very Long Victorian Novels, but a holiday to Cephalonia, a too-small suitcase, and the discovery that I could load my kindle with eight of them for the magnificent price of 50p, making sure I never ran of reading material, changed that. I discovered Anthony Trollope, and have read my way through a good part of his Barchester cycle: The Warden, Barchester Towers and the fattest of them all, Dr Thorne. This last proved absorbing reading on an Ionian beach, where the corrupt ways of small town Barchester were curiously appealing.

Anthony Trollope

First, a bit about Trollope. He was an enormously prolific novelist who also worked for the Post Office. Famously, when he finished one novel, he went straight to writing the first sentence of the next. He didn’t suffer from writer’s block or spend time wrestling with the muse, and it shows at times to be honest. There’s a certain bagginess to his books. He’s almost the opposite of Jane Austen in that respect: she is economical with detail and hones in on the important things. There is no surplus there at all. Trollope, on the other hand, is bursting with detail and digression and back story, and while some might think he could have done with an editorial red pen, if you want a feel for contemporary life – barouches and stately home architecture and railway timetables and all – then Trollope is your man.

And election campaigns. Which I’m getting to, with Trollopian slowness.

If different in style, Trollope is much closer to Austen in subject matter and theme (especially in Dr Thorne, which is about the marriage market). Like her, his stories are all about status and money and small communities where people are jostling for position. One detail that Austen does share with her readers – because it is not a detail but absolutely relevant – is how much her characters are worth. Pride and Prejudice says little about Mr Darcy’s appearance, education, taste in food or literature – I could go on – but it absolutely does inform the reader, more than once, that he is worth the staggering amount of ten thousand a year. Trollope also dwells on his characters’ finances.

The Barchester novels are all about money. In The Warden, the plot revolves around whether the gentle Mr Harding should be able to keep his comfortable Church of England sinecure. In Barchester Towers, the clerical fight over resources continues, perhaps most painfully for poor Mr and Mrs Quiverful, who are constantly losing and winning and losing again a comfortable home and income for their brood of ten according to whichever faction is ascendant. In Dr Thorne, appealing young couple Frank Gresham and Mary Thorne are kept from matrimony because Frank’s father has mortgaged away the family property, meaning Frank must marry for money. Subsequent financial shenanigans are central to the plot, and the couple’s fate.

It is these financial shenanigans that lead us to the subject of elections. It is standing for election to Parliament unsuccessfully twice that has led Frank Gresham’s father, the Squire, to financial penury. Urged on by his profligate, titled (and entitled) wife, Arabella, the vast expenditure required has indebted his estate. Victorian elections were not cheap. In desperation, and with the help of his friend, Dr Thorne, the Squire has arranged loans from local magnate Sir Roger Scratcherd. The estate therefore, is toppling on a financial precipice. The Squire’s son Frank’s love for the penniless and illegitimate Mary, niece of the local doctor, is doomed.

Like Austen, Trollope has conservative instincts. He is sympathetic to the Squire, as a member of the gentry class, even though he has squandered his estate. In many ways, the story of Dr Thorne is about the restoration of the status quo, and the reuniting of wealth with land, and status with responsibility. However, one of Trollope’s great gifts is for finding humanity everywhere. My favourite character in the novel – to my own surprise – is Sir Roger Scatcherd. A drunk, a convicted killer, and perhaps worst of all in Victorian eyes, a self made man, he has gone from humble stonemason to tycoon, entirely through his own talent and hard work.

Trollope’s world - with railways marked. George Frederick Muendel (1871-1948) ; Spencer Van Bokkelen Nichols (1882-1946), Wikimedia Commons

Scatcherd is a “railway man” – indeed, a “railway hero”. Railways were the great disruptors of the nineteenth century – transforming landscapes, both geographic and economic, upending traditional ways, cutting through communities, even transforming time. (It was the need for consistent railway timetables that led to the harmonisation of clocks across the UK.) As an employee of the Post Office, Trollope understood the importance of railways – in fact, many of his novels were written on them. Railways revolutionised the mail, just like everything else. He was therefore well-placed to create Sir Roger Scatcherd, a project manager for the vast railway construction of the nineteenth century, both in Britain and further afield. Scatcherd is both a beneficiary and instigator of one of the great economic and cultural upheavals of his time: a bit like a modern day Silicon Valley billionaire.

When Sir Roger Scatcherd enters the action in chapter nine, he is already a long way towards drinking himself to death. He’s living in a vast mansion, where his wife (the humbly born and equally likeable Lady Scatcherd) has a lonely time amidst empty grandeur, and he spends most of his time in bed with a brandy bottle. Most of the tension in these chapters comes from what he is going to put in his will, and there’s no doubt that Dr Thorne (who as country doctor somehow manages to maintain friendships with all sides) and Trollope himself believe that there are far better places for wealth than the pockets of the Scatcherds.

Yet it’s hard not to warm to Sir Roger. “And now my lady” – he tells his wife, on coming home from receiving a baronetcy at Buckingham Palace – “let’s have a bit of dinner, and a drop of som’at hot.” Scatcherd is never pompous and never tries to hides what he is. He is also in a cleft stick. His immense wealth – three hundred thousand pounds – has not opened up new horizons, but the opposite. He doesn’t fit into Victorian society. “If I go among gentleman, can I talk to them? … If I go among my workmen, can they talk to me?” Sometimes he rises to tragic heights, as he looks clearly at the wreckage of his life. Asked if he would die for drink, he responds, “Die for it? Aye, would I. Live for it while I can live; and die for it when I can live no longer. Die for it! What is that for a man to do? Do not men die for a shilling a day?”

A disruptor, a truth-teller, a wise fool – and funny too: Scatcherd is a force within the novel, exposing the pomposity and vanities of others, yet retaining a basic kindness and humanity. It is easy to see why Lady Scatcherd loves him, despite his failings, or how he maintains an unlikely friendship with the chalk to his cheese, Dr Thorne.

However, halfway through the novel Sir Roger Scatcherd stages a revival. And that is to fight the election. Scatcherd is standing in the seat of Barchester, the place where he was once a hard-drinking stonemason, but which is also a cathedral city. Sir Roger’s opponent is also “new money” but of a very different variety. Mr Moffatt is the son of a wealthy tailor, but having inherited a fortune, is intent on ingratiating himself with aristocracy and squirearchy. He is engaged to Frank’s sister, though he has no feelings for her at all, and has the political patronage of the noble De Courcy family – the same that once encouraged the Squire to political defeat and financial ruin. Moffatt is a cipher. There is nothing to him, personally or politically: he seeks status and wealth, but not for any purpose. He is a complete contrast to the flawed but human Sir Roger Scatcherd.

As important as politics to this election is money. “There was to be no bribery. Bribery! Who in these days would dare to bribe; to give absolute money for an absolute vote?”

As it happens, neither candidate particularly wishes to bribe the voters – Moffatt is too mean, and Scatcherd oblivious – but their political agents know that a stream of beer in the public houses is the surest way to electoral success. Election day in Barchester is a jolly time. There are bands playing, omnibuses and horses passing, scarlet and yellow ribbons on display and packed public houses. There is political graffitti mocking both candidates everywhere. It is in this lively atmosphere that Scatcherd and Moffatt face off against each other. “Peace abroad, and a big loaf at home,” is Scatcherd’s election motto. Moffatt, currying favour with a belligerent government, chooses, “England’s honour”, although as Trollope remarks there is not a single inhabitant of Barchester “so fatuous as to suppose that England’s honour was in any special manner dear to Mr Moffatt”.

In a lively speech, Scatcherd is able to neatly parry a dead cat thrown from the crowd with his stick. He freely admits to being “a railway man” and condemns his opponent as the son of a London tailor, who doesn’t even make his own living, and who is “so dumb a dog that he can’t bark even for a bone”. Mr Moffatt proves this true: his own speech is nothing but empty platitudes, and when an egg is hurled at him, it silences him. “Men there are, doubtless, whose tongues would not be stopped even by such an argument as this; but Mr Moffatt was not one of them.”

Scatcherd is duly elected, and in being selected as Member of Parliament for the city of his birth at last feels accepted into Victorian society. His origins and achievements have been reconciled. However, his victory is short lived. A petition is mounted against his election by the aristocratic De Courcy faction, and the key issue at stake is, fittingly, money. Sir Roger is condemned for buying a crucial vote, although the bribery was conducted without his knowledge. And he is heartbroken. “Death he did not fear; but he would fain have lived … while yet he could live, in the blaze of that high world to which for a moment he had attained.”

Dr Thorne is one of those novels where you end up rooting for the villain (although Scatcherd is never quite that). Like Satan in Paradise Lost, there is something seductively magnificent in Scatcherd and his fall. Dr Thorne is more about the disruptive power of money and economic change than most novels I have read and the irony is that the apparent victor, Scatcherd, who has broken through, is doomed to failure. The social order ultimately reasserts itself and the upheavals are absorbed, while the snobbish, vain, grasping titled and entitled who are sitting at the top of the pile, somehow remain in situ.

Since writing this, I’ve learned there is a TV series of Dr Thorne which I now want to watch, not just for Ian McShane’s version of Scatcherd but to see how 47 chapters are transformed into four episodes!