Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

that the ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness.

When I got back to the house a scene of devastation was in progress,

which still was not without its amusement. My mother, through

her various troubles, had contrived to keep a certain number of

pretty-pretties which were dear to her heart. They were not much,

for in those days the ornamentation of houses was not lavish as it

is now; but there was some china, and a little glass, a few books,

and a very moderate supply of household silver. These things, and

things like them, were being carried down surreptitiously, through

a gap between the two gardens, on to the premises of our friend

Colonel Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the

Grant girls, who were just younger, were the chief marauders. To

such forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise, and

between us we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers,

amidst the anathemas, but good-humoured abstinence from personal

violence, of the men in charge of the property. I still own a few

books that were thus purloined.

For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel's

hospitable roof, cared for and comforted by that dearest of all women,

his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium, and established

ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of Bruges. At

this time, and till my father's death, everything was done with

money earned by my mother. She now again furnished the house,--this

being the third that she had put in order since she came back from

America two years and a half ago.

There were six of us went into this new banishment. My brother

Henry had left Cambridge and was ill. My younger sister was ill.

And though as yet we hardly told each other that it was so, we began

to feel that that desolating fiend, consumption, was among us. My

father was broken-hearted as well as ill, but whenever he could

sit at his table he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My

elder sister and I were in good health, but I was an idle, desolate

hanger-on, that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy

of nineteen, without any idea of a career, or a profession, or

a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy, for there

were pretty girls at Bruges with whom I could fancy that I was in

love; and I had been removed from the real misery of school. But

as to my future life I had not even an aspiration. Now and again

there would arise a feeling that it was hard upon my mother that

she should have to do so much for us, that we should be idle while

she was forced to work so constantly; but we should probably have

thought more of that had she not taken to work as though it were

the recognised condition of life for an old lady of fifty-five.

Then, by degrees, an established sorrow was at home among us. My

brother was an invalid, and the horrid word, which of all words were

for some years after the most dreadful to us, had been pronounced.

It was no longer a delicate chest, and some temporary necessity

for peculiar care,--but consumption! The Bruges doctor had said

so, and we knew that he was right. From that time forth my mother's

most visible occupation was that of nursing. There were two sick

men in the house, and hers were the hands that tended them. The

novels went on, of course. We had already learned to know that they

would be forthcoming at stated intervals,--and they always were

forthcoming. The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle held equal

places in my mother's rooms. I have written many novels under many

circumstances; but I doubt much whether I could write one when my

whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing

herself into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself clear

from the troubles of the world, and fit for the duty it had to do,

I never saw equalled. I do not think that the writing of a novel

is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do;

but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly

at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir

Walter Scott. My mother went through it unscathed in strength,

though she performed all the work of day-nurse and night-nurse to

a sick household;--for there were soon three of them dying.

At this time there came from some quarter an offer to me of a

commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and so it was apparently

my destiny to be a soldier. But I must first learn German and

French, of which languages I knew almost nothing. For this a year

was allowed me, and in order that it might be accomplished without

expense, I undertook the duties of a classical usher to a school

then kept by William Drury at Brussels. Mr. Drury had been one of

the masters at Harrow when I went there at seven years old, and is

now, after an interval of fifty-three years, even yet officiating

as clergyman at that place. [Footnote: He died two years after

these words were written.] To Brussels I went, and my heart still

sinks within me as I reflect that any one should have intrusted to

me the tuition of thirty boys. I can only hope that those boys went

there to learn French, and that their parents were not particular

as to their classical acquirements. I remember that on two occasions

I was sent to take the school out for a walk; but that after the

second attempt Mrs. Drury declared that the boys' clothes would not

stand any further experiments of that kind. I cannot call to mind

any learning by me of other languages; but as I only remained in

that position for six weeks, perhaps the return lessons had not

been as yet commenced. At the end of the six weeks a letter reached

me, offering me a clerkship in the General Post Office, and I

accepted it. Among my mother's dearest friends she reckoned Mrs.

Freeling, the wife of Clayton Freeling, whose father, Sir Francis

Freeling, then ruled the Post Office. She had heard of my desolate

position, and had begged from her father-in-law the offer of a

berth in his own office.

I hurried back from Brussels to Bruges on my way to London, and

found that the number of invalids had been increased. My younger

sister, Emily, who, when I had left the house, was trembling on

the balance,--who had been pronounced to be delicate, but with that

false-tongued hope which knows the truth, but will lie lest the

heart should faint, had been called delicate, but only delicate,--was

now ill. Of course she was doomed. I knew it of both of them,

though I had never heard the word spoken, or had spoken it to any

one. And my father was very ill,--ill to dying, though I did not

know it. And my mother had decreed to send my elder sister away to

England, thinking that the vicinity of so much sickness might be

injurious to her. All this happened late in the autumn of 1834, in

the spring of which year we had come to Bruges; and then my mother

was left alone in a big house outside the town, with two Belgian

women-servants, to nurse these dying patients--the patients being

her husband and children--and to write novels for the sustenance

of the family! It was about this period of her career that her best

novels were written.

To my own initiation at the Post Office I will return in the next

chapter. Just before Christmas my brother died, and was buried at

Bruges. In the following February my father died, and was buried

alongside of him,--and with him died that tedious task of his,

which I can only hope may have solaced many of his latter hours. I

sometimes look back, meditating for hours together, on his adverse

fate. He was a man, finely educated, of great parts, with immense

capacity for work, physically strong very much beyond the average

of men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate

by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to

fair fortunes,--who, when he started in the world, may be said to

have had everything at his feet. But everything went wrong with

him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure. He embarked

in one hopeless enterprise after another, spending on each all the

money he could at the time command. But the worse curse to him of

all was a temper so irritable that even those whom he loved the

best could not endure it. We were all estranged from him, and yet

I believe that he would have given his heart's blood for any of

us. His life as I knew it was one long tragedy.

After his death my mother moved to England, and took and furnished

a small house at Hadley, near Barnet. I was then a clerk in the

London Post Office, and I remember well how gay she made the place

with little dinners, little dances, and little picnics, while

she herself was at work every morning long before others had left

their beds. But she did not stay at Hadley much above a year. She

went up to London, where she again took and furnished a house,

from which my remaining sister was married and carried away into

Cumberland. My mother soon followed her, and on this occasion did

more than take a house. She bought a bit of land,--a field of three

acres near the town,--and built a residence for herself. This, I

think, was in 1841, and she had thus established and re-established

herself six times in ten years. But in Cumberland she found the

climate too severe, and in 1844 she moved herself to Florence,

where she remained till her death in 1863. She continued writing

up to 1856, when she was seventy-six years old,--and had at that

time produced 114 volumes, of which the first was not written till

she was fifty. Her career offers great encouragement to those who

have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something

before they depart hence.

She was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman,

with great capacity for enjoyment and high physical gifts. She was

endowed too, with much creative power, with considerable humour,

and a genuine feeling for romance. But she was neither clear-sighted

nor accurate; and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and

even facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration.

While I was still learning my duty as an usher at Mr. Drury's

school at Brussels, I was summoned to my clerkship in the London

Post Office, and on my way passed through Bruges. I then saw my

father and my brother Henry for the last time. A sadder household

never was held together. They were all dying; except my mother, who

would sit up night after night nursing the dying ones and writing

novels the while,--so that there might be a decent roof for them

to die under. Had she failed to write the novels, I do not know

where the roof would have been found. It is now more that forty

years ago, and looking back over so long a lapse of time I can tell

the story, though it be the story of my own father and mother, of

my own brother and sister, almost as coldly as I have often done

some scene of intended pathos in fiction; but that scene was indeed

full of pathos. I was then becoming alive to the blighted ambition