Framley Parsonage Read Online Free

This passage neither asks us to judge Mark severely nor allows us to forget the slippery slope. The reader of Trollope mustbe perpetually alert to this doubleness of tone, at once taking things lightly and reminding us of an undertow of seriousness. To try to limit Trollope’s narrative voice to one level is to make it dull and to lose most of the sparkle, humour and moral implication of what it says.
    The reality of ‘going to the bad’ is embodied in Nathaniel Sowerby, while as far as Mark Robarts is concerned we areanxious as to how, not whether, his problems are to be solved. The title of the first chapter sums up a great deal. ‘Omnes omnia bona dicere’ comes from the opening of Terence’s comedy
The Andria
, in which a father declares, in the translation which Trollopesilently embeds in his first sentence, that ‘all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessedwith so excellent a disposition’. The son goes astray, of course, and the quotation conveys to the aware reader that Mark is soon destined to fall from his initial perfection. Furthermore the reference indicates that, just as in the Terence, the complications will be resolved and our hero restored to favour. The quotation is half echoed in the final chapter, when Mark is safe, but this timeit refers to Griselda Grantly, reinforcing a major theme of the novel by highlighting her great social success and undercutting it with an awareness of moral and human deadness. Meanwhile the stage is set for a new comedy to be played out in the future.
    Mark’s situation is particularly delicate because at this date clergymen were expected to attend to their duties and regulate their lives withan earnestness rare a generation or two before, and
Framley Parsonage
, like the three earlier
Chronicles of Barset-shire
and like much of Thackeray and George Eliot too, records the triumph of Victorian seriousness and morality over Regency manners in secular and religious life. The point is confirmed if we look at another instance in which a judgement is simultaneously taken seriously and gentlymocked. Lady Lufton regards the Duke of Omnium as ‘the very head of all such sinners’ who reject family life in favour of a free, bachelor existence, and sees him as ‘that fabricator of evil’ and ‘the nearest representative of Satanic agency, which… was allowed to walk this nether English world of ours’. 21 Clearly she exaggerates, and is affectionately made fun of for it. But equally she is right.The Duke of Omnium
is
an old rake, and
does
represent those old Regency habits that would spell ruin to a mid-Victorian young man like Lord Lufton, or to a mid-Victorian young clergyman like Mark Robarts. Sowerby
is
ruined and
is
dishonest, and he is hardly to be called a gentleman, morally speaking. Prudential middle-class morality has generally triumphed in all but a few old aristocratic circles,or among ‘fast’ people in London. Lady Lufton’s encounter with the Duke at Miss Dunstable’s ‘at Home’ is a piece of social pantomime, but it is also a moment in the history of English ideology.
    In
Framley Parsonage
Trollope is concerned, as always, with examining the standards of behaviour appropriate to the ‘gentleman’, defined now in the Victorian period by moral standing and not by rank insociety alone. To be a Victorian gentleman is to behave in all the complex circumstances of life with a constant regard for others and respect for oneself; moreover, the circumstances in question being so many and so varied, the qualities of gentlemanliness resist simple codification, and can only be acquired and demonstrated in practice. Trollope’s novels typically trace the acquisition and exerciseof the moral maturity required in the gentleman, and although his clerical characters are in some aspects of their lives necessarily unlike his laity they share with them a common basis of gentlemanly behaviour. Froude’s famous dictum