Mangle and Crawley in “Last Chronicle of Barset”
Last week I took a road trip with my mother through the Midwest, starting with a wedding in Des Moines (or rather a wedding-turned-family-reunion as the wedding itself was canceled at the last moment) and moving on to visits with each of my brothers (in Madison, Iowa City, and Clarksville, Tennessee). As we drove, my mother told me family stories, filling in the gaps about my Iowa cousins, some of whom I was meeting for the first time. When we weren’t talking, we were listening to Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). After a while, family history became suffused with a Trollopian aura.
Trollope’s Barsetshire novels—there are six of them—describe the loves, ambitions, rivalries, and other interactions of a set of families in a fictional British county in the mid-19th century. Characters who are peripheral in one novel become central in another while formerly central characters play bit parts in subsequent novels.
This is also how my lessons in family history functioned. There were names that, while I had heard them all my life, were only vague markers. My mother’s grandmother, our common ancestor, was Elvine Robins Jackson, her sister was Phoebe, and the names “Jackson,” “Robins” and “Phoebe” appear regularly in the family genealogy. My mother is Phoebe Robins Strehlow Bates, and I, of course, am Robin. (My father was a poet and, while the family didn’t approve of my parents dropping the “s,” “Robins” doesn’t scan well with “Bates.”) Figuring out all the family members was like reading a novel and stopping for a moment to get all the characters straight. Likewise, meeting Phoebe Cornelia Montgomery, now retired in Des Moines, and Phoebe Robins Hunter, who works in the Student Life office at the University of Montana, was like witnessing minor characters who suddenly bloom into major figures.
Also resembling a novel were the fascinating career arcs, tragedies, marriages, and divorces connected to the names. Also novelistic were the small personal incidents, which added color and cast light on the different personalities. I found myself drawn to stories of cousins interacting at Lake Okoboji during summer vacations and at Peoria during Thanksgiving reunions.
I came to Trollope, as I did to my family history, in a disjointed way, checking out whichever disk versions of Trollope the library happened to have. I therefore started with the second novel in the series (Barchester Towers, 1957), moved on to the sixth novel (Last Chronicle) and am now listening to the third novel (Doctor Thorne, 1958, which promises to be one of the best). I therefore have a sense that, while I am privy to only sections of a larger picture, I am making progress towards mapping the whole. Names start sticking after I have encountered them two or three times. Of course, every advance involves new names that await further exploration.
Adding further to the enjoyment is Trollope’s Victorian setting since both my mother’s and my father’s family have English roots in the 19th century. I am well aware, however, that my own family, had they shown up in the novels, would be the domestic servants and gamekeepers, the brick makers and coachmen, that are peripheral to the lives of Trollope’s main characters. “Jackson” is hardly an elevated named and “Bates” may be a diminutive of the trade name “boat’s man.”
In some ways, my mother’s and my journey through the Midwest was itself a means of shoring up a family narrative. America, of course, is a far more mobile society than Europe, especially 19th century Europe, and my siblings and I are now spread over the landscape. And to take a step up the family tree, the larger Bates clan—my father was one of three boys—is now trying to figure out how to handle the increasing expenses of our Maine cottage, built by my great grandmother Sarah Ricker on an apple farm that my cousins the Rickers still run. If we were to relinquish the cottage, a symbol of our connection, would we disintegrate into an atomistic existence, located as we are in Maine, New York, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, California, and Oregon?
While life in Barsetshire sometimes feels claustrophobic to those living in it, it has a certain attraction for American readers today, given the diaspora that is an integral part of American history. Maybe that’s why there are a number of enthusiastic Trollope readers in this country. It doesn’t matter that many of the characters are petty, snobbish, vindictive, manipulative and self-absorbed. What matters is that they are part of a larger web.
