Abstract
This chapter examines two interlinked issues in Trollope’s ‘London’: capitalism and gender relations. The first two sections trace his critiques of financial fraud and the abuse of credit from the 1850s to the 1870s. Then, an analysis of contemporary controversies about femininity and the legal and financial situation of women establishes the framework for my concluding discussion of women and property in The Way We Live Now.
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Notes
George Levine, ‘Can You Forgive Him? Trollope’s “Can You Forgive Her?” and the Myth of Realism’, VS, 18 (September 1974) 5–30; p. 7.
John Hagan, ‘The Divided Mind of Anthony Trollope’, NCF, 14 (1959–60) 1–26.
Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley, 1978).
Juliet McMaster, Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern (Basingstoke, 1978).
James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford, 1977).
John Halperin, Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (Basingstoke, 1977), pp. 38–45.
David Aitken, ‘Anthony Trollope on “the Genus Girl” ‘, NCF, 28 (1973–4) 417–34.
Jane Nardin, He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale, 1989), p. 18.
Ibid., p. 210 and passim;Deborah Denenholz Morse, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Ann Arbor, 1987).
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).
Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope (Brighton, 1982), p. 2 and passim.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene[1596], ed. A.C. Hamilton (1980), II. vii. 24.
Trollope, Doctor Thorne [1858], ed. David Skilton (Oxford, 1980), pp. 12–13.
Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson[1861–2], ed. N. John Hall (Oxford, 1992).
The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. D. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 201–2, 216–17, 221–3, 436–7.
Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914 (1964), pp. 142–3.
John Sutherland discusses sources for Melmotte in his edition of The Way We Live Now (Oxford, 1982), pp. xvii–xxi, and in TLS, 4 August 1995. Subsequent page references are to this edition.
J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985).
See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and Historyand The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), on which my summary is based.
Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981).
Review of Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories, 21 September 1867, in David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972; Basingstoke, 1996), p. 22.
Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (1969), pp. 407–9.
Trollope, An Autobiography[1883], ed. Michael Sadleir, Frederick Page and P.D. Edwards (Oxford, 1980), p. 360.
Ranald C. Michie, The London Stock Exchange: A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 102–3.
Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 119.
His prejudices are most apparent in his virulent attacks on Disraeli. It seems that in private life (as in his friendship with the Rothschilds) and in his fiction (e.g. his positive characterisation of Brehgert and Mme Max Goesler) Trollope’s tolerance towards individuals could transcend his mistrust of Jews in general, apparent enough in the racist descriptions of Rev. Joseph Emilius, the converted Jew. Like Disraeli, Emilius had, in Trollope’s view, reduced his religious affiliation to a matter of expediency: a ‘dishonesty’ of which Melmotte is also guilty. See also Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford, 2000), pp. 73–88.
Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, ed. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester, 1987), pp. 1–4, 102–4.
John Hagan, ‘The Duke’s Children: Trollope’s Psychological Masterpiece’, NCF, 13 (1958–9) 1–21, remains the seminal account.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford, 1991), pp. 515–16.
The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater etal, 4 vols. (1994–2000), III, pp. 42–9.
Letter, March 1854, quoted in Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 95.
Punch, 33 (3 October 1857) 140–1. On this 1857 controversy, see Harriet Martineau, ‘Female Industry’, Edinburgh Review, 109 (1859) 293–336, in ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough, 1995), pp. 29–70; pp. 46–7.
Compare ‘“Rotten-Row.” — Painted by G.H. Thomas’, ILN, 40 (17 May 1862) 516; and Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (1976), pp. 179–81.
This point is made in Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, ed. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge (Peterborough, 1998), pp. 24–6. William Fraser Rae’s review is quoted ibid., p. 587.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), Ch. 4.
‘Queen Bees or Working Bees?’, Saturday Review, 12 November 1859, quoted in Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), p. 154.
Quoted in Woman Question, II, p. 148. For other contemporary comparisons of marriage to prostitution, see Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, 1989), pp. 60–2.
[George Drysdale], The Elements of Social Science [1854/5, 1860], 23rd edition (1884), p. 357. See pp. 355–7, 364–6, 402–5.
Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (1975), pp. 3–4.
W.R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862) 434–60.
William Acton, Prostitution, [1857], 2nd edition, 1870, ed. Peter Fryer (New York, 1969), pp. 74, 121–5, quoting a letter and editorial commentary in The Times, May 1857.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), p. 212.
Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on The Laws of England[1765–9], 19th edition (1836), I, p. 442.
This simplifies somewhat the legal complexities. For more details see Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (1989), pp. 10–19.
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’, Fraser’s Magazine, 78 (1868) 777–94; pp. 780, 788.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick [1792] (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 83–4, 100. Compare the comments on ‘power’ and ‘influence’ of Marion Reid and John Stuart Mill, in Woman Question, I, pp. 15–16 and II, p. 43.
Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (1909), quoted in Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1989), p. 152. Little had changed since Wollstonecraft’s similar observation (p. 147).
Henry James, ‘Modern Women’, Nation, 22 October 1868, in LC1, p. 22.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 25 (1868) 339–40.
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© 2004 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2004). Property and Propriety. In: Imagining London, 1770–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596924_7
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