And now, if the reader will allow me to seize him affectionately by the arm, we will together take our last farewell of Barset and of the towers of Barsetshire. To me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are known to my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. To them all I say farewell. That I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces, is a fact for which I shall perhaps be more readily forgiven, when I repeat, with some solemnity of assurance, the promise made in my title, that this shall be the last chronicle of Barset.
So writes Trollope in the final paragraph of the final novel in this tremendous series. And I too have a hope, that the reader will excuse me if I say a small tear came into my eye when I got to the end and realised that I would never hear any more of the lives of so many people I have got to know and love (or hate) over the past few months of devouring the Barsetshire Chronicles. Actually when I say hate I tell a lie, because even the most monstrous characters -- most notably Mrs Proudie -- are impossible not to love or at least feel a terrible fascination with.
I have now read the whole series, including re-reading all the ones I had first encountered many years ago. All, that is, apart from The Small House at Allington, and there's a reason for that, which is that I'm afraid I cannot stand Lily Dale. Lily, who is the heroine of The Small House, reappears in this novel, and I was on tenterhooks -- as I'm sure Trollope fully intended us to be -- as to whether she would see the folly of her ways and accept the man who has loved her so steadfastly for so long. I suppose I'd better not say whether she does or not, because although there were times when I was sorely tempted to flick forward to see what the outcome was going to be, I managed to hold off, so I suppose I'd better avoid spoilers.
If you haven't read any of these novels you won't have an idea what I'm on about. Lily and her lover are in fact secondary to the main plot of this final novel, which deals with the agonising uncertainty surrounding the loss of a check for £20. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But according to Measuring Worth, it was the equivalent of about £1,500 in today's money. Quite a theft, then, in any circumstances, but when you know that the person suspected of stealing it is a clergyman, Mr Josiah Crawley, you will realize what a shocking situation this is.
Josiah Crawley is no ordinary clergyman. Born a gentleman (something of great importance to Trollope), with one of the most brilliant academic minds of his generation, he has lived for most of his life in abject poverty. This is the result, as Trollope is not slow to tell us, of the shocking inequality in the pay of the clergy. The total income of the Crawley household is £130 a year, a ridiculously small amount considering he has a wife, two daughters and a son. So for many years he, or rather his devoted wife, has accepted occasional handouts from his old friend Arabin, the Dean of Barchester, and his wife Eleanor. To say that Crawley is a proud man hardly encompasses the situation. He finds it almost unbearable that he sometimes has to accept money from his friend, but there are times when he cannot do otherwise to save his family from ruin. And as this novel begins, he has done just that -- unwillingly taken £50 in cash from Arabin. Soon afterwards, however, he has handed a check for £20 to the butcher, and it is this check that he is now accused of stealing. And unfortunately he is unable to account for where he got it from.
All this is bad enough, and for most of the novel Crawley is awaiting his trial and probably imprisonment. But matters are made much worse by the fact that his daughter Grace, a lovely and highly educated girl, has formed a relationship with Major Henry Grantly, the son of the Archdeacon. Henry is most anxious to marry Grace, but his father is furious, saying the marriage will bring disgrace to the family, and Grace will not consent to marry him unless his father is happy for her to do so.
Such are the nail-biting issues that make this final novel such an incredible page turner. I'm tempted to say that this has been my favorite novel of the series, but I expect I've felt that way about each of them in turn. But I have to say that Crawley is an absolutely fascinating character who, as I read somewhere, may have been at least partly based on Trollope's own father. He is both admirable and exasperating, brilliant and idiotic, sometimes almost insane but also the most principled and good hearted man you could hope to meet.
So -- a great joy to read, and to find that most peoples' lives are wrapped up in a pretty satisfactory way. A couple of them come to a final close, others make rather strange choices, but all in all it is possible to look forward to future happiness for the majority of these characters who have become so real over the course of these extraordinary novels. Hooray for Trollope, I say.
