The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Online Free

establish reliable postal networks worldwide. He had, over these years, ‘imbued myself with a thorough love of letters, – I mean theletters which are carried by the post, – and was anxious for their welfare as though they were all my own’. 10 To create these seamless networks in which all is accounted for, every piece properly delivered, was important to him not only as a surveyor of letters, but as a ‘man of letters’ also. Trollope was a master of the Victorian multiplot novel and was anxious that all the plots and characters should be properly traced, accounted for and delivered. The creation of a flawless network of postal letters and fictional plots was satisfying, perhaps, in the increasingly modern and fragmented Victorian world, providing the illusion at least of some order and sanity in a time of rapid expansion and change. So it is with the understanding of both the civil servant and the novelist that Trollope tells the story of Reverend Crawley’s anguish and unravelling sanity at not being able to account for a cheque for twenty pounds. His is the nightmarish doubt and irrational guilt of anyone who has worked in an office, or paid the bills, or filled in forms – the panic which arises from an inability to answer when the voice of officialdom demands to know where something is, or, as in the title of chapter 19 , ‘Where Did it Come From?’
    All Barsetshire, from the butcher to the bishop, are asking this question of Josiah Crawley, but at the close of chapter 19 it is his wife who asks, and Crawley’s response reveals something of what is at stake for the man who cannot remember, who cannot account for a bit of paper:
    â€˜Yes,’ said he; ‘yes; that is the question. Where did it come from?’ – and he turned sharp upon her, looking at her with all the power of his eyes. ‘It is because I cannot tell you where it came from that I ought to be – either in Bedlam, as a madman, or in the county gaol as a thief.’
    The fragmenting pauses of Crawley’s language here reveal the fragmentation of his own mind: ‘How is a man – to think himself – fit – for a man’s work… They should take me to Bedlam at once – at once – at once.’ ‘And am I a thief?’ he asks himself at the end of chapter 12 , ‘standing in the middle of the road, with his hands up to his forehead’. It is a powerful image of a man almost literally tryingto hold his head together. To be, as Crawley puts it, ‘fit for a man’s work’ is crucial to Victorian definitions of manliness; this fitness is constituted of values which enable the man to hold his head high, to struggle against the shame of debt and the vulnerability of dependence or poverty, to be the trusted and respected public man, and the paterfamilias in public and private.
    For the Victorian gentleman a classical education taught the pagan virtues, put forward in Aristotle’s
Politics
, of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. These were just as important, if not more so, than the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity in the formation of the Victorian ideal of manliness. A gentleman should be whole and unassailable in his practical wisdom and fortitude, and can be held accountable for his actions. This makes it very difficult for Mrs Crawley to ask her husband where the cheque for twenty pounds came from because she ‘could not endure to make him think that she suspected him of any frailty either in intellect or thought. Wifelike, she desired to worship him, and that he should know that she worshipped him’ (ch. 19 ).
    Before he jilted her, and probably after as well, Lily Dale worshipped her fiancé Adolphus Crosbie. He had been to her an ‘Apollo’; she ‘had ever pictured to herself the lover whom she had preferred as having something godlike in his favour’ (ch. 59 ). Trollope frequently depicts