Autobiography of Anthony Trollope - Anthony Trollope

three months after the time named." In these emergencies I have

given perhaps half what was wanted, and have refused to give the

other half. I have endeavoured to fight my own battle fairly, and

at the same time not to make myself unnecessarily obstinate. But

the circumstances have impressed on my mind the great need there is

that men engaged in literature should feel themselves to be bound

to their industry as men know that they are bound in other callings.

There does exist, I fear, a feeling that authors, because they are

authors, are relieved from the necessity of paying attention to

everyday rules. A writer, if he be making (pounds)800 a year, does not think

himself bound to live modestly on (pounds)600, and put by the remainder

for his wife and children. He does not understand that he should

sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers

and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to

the letter;--but that he, as a brain-worker, and conscious of the

subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from

bonds when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration

which will not always come,--especially will not come if wine-cups

overnight have been too deep. All this has ever been odious to

me, as being unmanly. A man may be frail in health, and therefore

unable to do as he has contracted in whatever grade of life. He who

has been blessed with physical strength to work day by day, year

by year--as has been my case--should pardon deficiencies caused

by sickness or infirmity. I may in this respect have been a little

hard on others,--and, if so, I here record my repentance. But

I think that no allowance should be given to claims for exemption

from punctuality, made if not absolutely on the score still with

the conviction of intellectual superiority.

The Vicar of Bullhampton was written chiefly with the object of

exciting not only pity but sympathy for fallen woman, and of raising

a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I

could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To

have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed

to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be

a second-rate personage in the tale;--but it was with reference to

her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with

their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a

preface,--in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old-established

principle. I do not know that any one read it; but as I wish to

have it read, I will insert it here again:--

"I have introduced in the Vicar of Bullhampton the character of a

girl whom I will call,--for want of a truer word that shall not in

its truth be offensive,--a castaway. I have endeavoured to endow

her with qualities that may create sympathy, and I have brought

her back at last from degradation, at least to decency. I have not

married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavoured to explain

that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still

things could not be with her as they would have been had she not

fallen.

"There arises, of course, the question whether a novelist, who

professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes,

should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as

that of Carry Brattle. It is not long since,--it is well within the

memory of the author,--that the very existence of such a condition

of life as was hers, was supposed to be unknown to our sisters and

daughters, and was, in truth, unknown to many of them. Whether that

ignorance was good may be questioned; but that it exists no longer

is beyond question. Then arises the further question,--how far the

conditions of such unfortunates should be made a matter of concern

to the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness

of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us. Cannot women,

who are good, pity the sufferings of the vicious, and do something

perhaps to mitigate and shorten them without contamination from the

vice? It will be admitted probably by most men who have thought

upon the subject that no fault among us is punished so heavily

as that fault, often so light in itself but so terrible in its

consequences to the less faulty of the two offenders, by which a

woman falls. All of her own sex is against her, and all those of

the other sex in whose veins runs the blood which she is thought

to have contaminated, and who, of nature, would befriend her, were

her trouble any other than it is.

"She is what she is, and she remains in her abject, pitiless,

unutterable misery, because this sentence of the world has placed

her beyond the helping hand of Love and Friendship. It may be said,

no doubt, that the severity of this judgment acts as a protection

to female virtue,--deterring, as all known punishments do deter, from

vice. But this punishment, which is horrible beyond the conception

of those who have not regarded it closely, is not known beforehand.

Instead of the punishment, there is seen a false glitter of gaudy

life,--a glitter which is damnably false,--and which, alas I has

been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of

young girls, than have those horrors which ought to deter, with

the dark shadowings which belong to them.

"To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex,

as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life

is, happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice

and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be

handled with truth to life, some girl, who would have been thoughtless,

may be made thoughtful, or some parent's heart may be softened."

Those were my ideas when I conceived the story, and with that

feeling I described the characters of Carry Brattle and of her

family. I have not introduced her lover on the scene, nor have I

presented her to the reader in the temporary enjoyment of any of

those fallacious luxuries, the longing for which is sometimes more

seductive to evil than love itself. She is introduced as a poor

abased creature, who hardly knows how false were her dreams, with

very little of the Magdalene about her--because though there may

be Magdalenes they are not often found--but with an intense horror

of the sufferings of her position. Such being her condition, will

they who naturally are her friends protect her? The vicar who has

taken her by the hand endeavours to excite them to charity; but

father, and brother, and sister are alike hard-hearted. It had

been my purpose at first that the hand of every Brattle should be

against her; but my own heart was too soft to enable me to make

the mother cruel,--or the unmarried sister who had been the early

companion of the forlorn one.

As regards all the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told.

The characters are true, and the scenes at the mill are in keeping

with human nature. For the rest of the book I have little to say.

It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very good. As I have

myself forgotten what the heroine does and says--except that she

tumbles into a ditch--I cannot expect that any one else should

remember her. But I have forgotten nothing that was done or said

by any of the Brattles.

The question brought in argument is one of fearful importance. As

to the view to be taken first, there can, I think, be no doubt. In

regard to a sin common to the two sexes, almost all the punishment

and all the disgrace is heaped upon the one who in nine cases out

of ten has been the least sinful. And the punishment inflicted is

of such a nature that it hardly allows room for repentance. How is

the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?

Then comes the answer: It is to the severity of the punishment alone

that we can trust to keep women from falling. Such is the argument

used in favour of the existing practice, and such the excuse

given for their severity by women who will relax nothing of their

harshness. But in truth the severity of the punishment is not known

beforehand; it is not in the least understood by women in general,

except by those who suffer it. The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty,

the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all

good things, the banishment from honest labour, the being compassed

round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the

weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant,--and then

the quick depreciation of that one ware of beauty, the substituted

paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres,

hunger, thirst, and strong drink, life without a hope, without the

certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease,

starvation, and a quivering fear of that coming hell which still

can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here! This is the

life to which we doom our erring daughters, when because of their

error we close our door upon them! But for our erring sons we find

pardon easily enough.

Of course there are houses of refuge, from which it has been

thought expedient to banish everything pleasant, as though the only

repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily

be one of sackcloth and ashes. It is hardly thus that we can hope

to recall those to decency who, if they are to be recalled at

all, must be induced to obey the summons before they have reached

the last stage of that misery which I have attempted to describe.

To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this,--that

the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind if

possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed,

and that this ferocity comes not only from hatred of the sin, put

in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with

it. Very low as is the degradation to which a girl is brought when

she falls through love or vanity, or perhaps from a longing for

luxurious ease, still much lower is that to which she must descend

perforce when, through the hardness of the world around her,

she converts that sin into a trade. Mothers and sisters, when the

misfortune comes upon them of a fallen female from among their

number, should remember this, and not fear contamination so strongly