Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because

of the expense, or because my chance of New College was supposed

to have passed away, I do not know. As a fact, I should, I believe,

have gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional

number of vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there

would have been no funds for my maintenance at the University

till I should have entered in upon the fruition of the founder's

endowment, and my career at Oxford must have been unfortunate.

When I left Winchester, I had three more years of school before me,

having as yet endured nine. My father at this time having left my

mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself

to live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm

he had hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three

miles from Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from

this house I was again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let

those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual

appurtenances of a boy at such a school, consider what must have

been my condition among them, with a daily walk of twelve miles

through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labours

of a school life!

Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition,

walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst

period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age

at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion

from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was

despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more

than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always

to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it

crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from

barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dungheaps, one could hardly

tell where one began and the other ended! There was a parlour in

which my father lived, shut up among big books; but I passed my most

jocund hours in the kitchen, making innocent love to the bailiff's

daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening,

when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the

cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk

at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a

century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was

measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never

premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from

a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still,

next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a

year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look

back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those

of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor

did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense,

except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject,

was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My

tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact

in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the

charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little

as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of

three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time

I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes

of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion,

and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent

had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed,

I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive

who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of

my school-days, I am not making a false boast.

I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that

farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative,

though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford.

My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except

what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always

in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of

self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I

think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered

fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large

rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal

incentives were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to

get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hayfields

on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much

profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years

of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering

agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when

suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an Encyclopedia

Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to the moment

of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical

terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks

and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions.

Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference,

with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful

task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out

of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear,

unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile

literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts.

And my father, though he would try, as it were by a side wind, to

get a useful spurt of work out of me, either in the garden or in

the hay-field, had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement.

From my very babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to

take my place alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the

morning, and say my early rules from the Latin Grammar, or repeat

the Greek alphabet; and was obliged at these early lessons to hold

my head inclined towards him, so that in the event of guilty fault,

he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor or

dropping his shaving-brush. No father was ever more anxious for

the education of his children, though I think none ever knew less

how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as I can remember,

he never recognised the need. He allowed himself no distraction,

and did not seem to think it was necessary to a child. I cannot

bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for

my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make

any sacrifice. At this time, in the farmhouse at Harrow Weald,

he could not give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was

not in the fields was devoted to his monks and nuns; but he would

require me to sit at a table with Lexicon and Gradus before me.

As I look back on my resolute idleness and fixed determination to

make no use whatever of the books thus thrust upon me, or of the

hours, and as I bear in mind the consciousness of great energy in

after-life, I am in doubt whether my nature is wholly altered, or

whether his plan was wholly bad. In those days he never punished

me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness; but in passion

he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great

folio Bible which he always used. In the old house were the two first

volumes of Cooper's novel, called The Prairie, a relic--probably a

dishonest relic--of some subscription to Hookham's library. Other

books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many dozen times I

read those two first volumes.

It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards

which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet, as a

walk along an English lane, when the air is sweet and the weather

fine, and when there is a charm in walking? But here were the same

lanes four times a day, in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with

all the accompanying mud and dust, and with disordered clothes. I

might have been known among all the boys at a hundred yards' distance

by my boots and trousers,--and was conscious at all times that I

was so known. I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler

when I was a little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have

said the same thing any day,--only that Dr. Longley never in his

life was able to say an ill-natured word. Dr. Butler only became

Dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be Archbishop of

Canterbury.

I think it was in the autumn of 1831 that my mother, with the rest

of the family, returned from America. She lived at first at the

farmhouse, but it was only for a short time. She came back with a

book written about the United States, and the immediate pecuniary

success which that work obtained enabled her to take us all back to

the house at Harrow,--not to the first house, which would still have

been beyond her means, but to that which has since been called

Orley Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at

Harrow Weald. Here my schooling went on under somewhat improved

circumstances. The three miles became half a mile, and probably

some salutary changes were made in my wardrobe. My mother and

my sisters, too, were there. And a great element of happiness was

added to us all in the affectionate and life-enduring friendship

of the family of our close neighbour Colonel Grant. But I was never

able to overcome--or even to attempt to overcome--the absolute

isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground or racket-court

I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things

with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a covetousness

that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an

Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate

because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school-days

has clung to me all through life. Not that I have ever shunned to

speak of them as openly as I am writing now, but that when I have

been claimed as schoolfellow by some of those many hundreds who

were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that

I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in