The American Senator
Encyclopedia
The American Senator is a novel written in 1875 by Anthony Trollope
. Although not one of Trollope's better-known works, it is notable for its depictions of rural English life and for its many detailed fox hunting
scenes. In its anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, it presents a scathing but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a woman who has abandoned virtually all scruples in her quest for a husband. Through the eponymous Senator, Trollope offers comments on the irrational aspects of English life.
The heroine, Mary Masters, is the daughter of an attorney, and has been raised as a gentlewoman. Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer
with aspirations to gentility. While Mary respects Twentyman for his excellent qualities, she feels that she cannot love him as a wife should a husband. She admires Reginald Morton, whose cousin is the squire of Bragton and thus one of the two major landowners of Rufford County. Reginald admires Mary as well; but for most of the novel, each is ignorant of the other's feelings: Mary, as a gentlewoman, cannot take the initiative in such a matter; and Reginald, misinformed that Mary loves another, is unwilling to make an offer and have it rejected.
The anti-heroine of the novel is Arabella Trefoil. Her father is cousin to the Duke of Mayfair; her mother was a banker's daughter. Her parents are unofficially separated, and living in straitened circumstances. Arabella and her mother, Lady Augustus Trefoil, have no fixed abode; they wander from place to place, visiting people who cannot refuse them without creating social awkwardness. At Lady Augustus's direction, Arabella has spent many years struggling to secure a rich husband who will give her and her mother high social standing, an assured income, and a house of their own. She has lately become provisionally engaged to John Morton, the squire of Bragton and a rising figure in the Foreign Office
. He would be an adequate but not outstanding husband by her standards; and when the opportunity presents itself, she attempts to entrap the wealthy and titled young Lord Rufford, concealing these attempts from Morton so that she can accept his proposal should they fail.
John Morton falls ill and dies. Arabella, who is not altogether wicked, visits him at his deathbed despite the fact that this will assist Lord Rufford in escaping her toils. After Morton's death, she accepts an offer of marriage from Mounser Green, a Foreign Office clerk who is taking Morton's place as ambassador-designate to Patagonia. Like Morton, Green is not a brilliant match for her, but an acceptable one. John Morton's death makes Reginald Morton the squire of Bragton; at this point, when Mary Masters fears that he has moved too far above her in status, he confesses his love to her. A proposal ensues and is eagerly accepted.
The American senator of the title is Elias Gotobed, who sits in the U.S. Senate
for the fictional state of Mikewa. The guest of John Morton, Senator Gotobed is trying to learn about England and the English. Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled "The Irrationality of Englishmen", he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England
, the custom of primogeniture
, and other aspects of English life.
in the Lettres Persanes
and by Goldsmith
in The Citizen of the World. As an outsider, he comments on the absurd or irrational aspects of English society. Gotobed finds much at fault with his host country: the sale of livings
in the Church of England
, the sale of commissions in the British army, the custom of primogeniture
, the unelected hereditary House of Lords
and the lack of proportional representation in the House of Commons, and a system that defers to the wealthy and titled at the expense of justice to those of lower social standing.
It is difficult to know the extent to which Gotobed's views reflected Trollope's own. On the one hand, the Senator's denunciations of clerical livings were very similar to criticisms that Trollope had levelled at Bishop Wilberforce
. On the other, some of Gotobed's strongest strictures were directed at fox-hunting, to which Trollope was devoted.
Late in 1876, Trollope wrote: "[Gotobed] is a thoroughly honest man wishing to do good, and is not himself half so absurd as the things which he criticises." It should be noted that the novel was written and set during the scandals of Ulysses S. Grant's administration
. The dishonest politician was a stock figure in American novels of the time; and Trollope himself had noted the ubiquity of corruption on his postal mission to Washington in 1868. Yet Gotobed is an honorable man, and Trollope apparently tried to avoid making a caricature of him, notwithstanding a few quaint Americanisms and episodes of tobacco-chewing.
The key is a character's telling the Senator that his views are "utilitarian
rather than picturesque" and his lecture's title: "The Irrationality of Englishmen". To Trollope, the English system was strong precisely because it was picturesque rather than logical, and should not be criticized or adjusted according to utilitarian theories. Fox-hunting was one of the strongest illustrations of this. In Ruth apRoberts
' words, "The Senator is too much the rationalist ever to enjoy something he could not think he understood; and Trollope is too much the empiricist to deny the existence of his joy or his sure sense of its beneficence. But he very well knew the absurd aspects of hunting."
The parallels extend to the mother figures. Both Mrs. Masters and Lady Augustus married men who were above them socially, and both brought money to the marriage. Mrs. Masters was the daughter of an ironmonger who married an attorney; her dowry of £1000 "had been very useful" to her new husband. Lady Augustus was the daughter of a banker who married the impecunious younger son of a duke; to further the parallel, malicious gossip makes her the daughter of an ironmonger as well.
It may have been Trollope's intention to make Mary good and Arabella evil. "I wished to express the depth of my scorn for women who run down [pursue] husbands," he wrote to Mary Holmes. Arabella has been described as a feminine counterpart to Augustus Melmotte of The Way We Live Now
or Ferdinand Lopez of The Prime Minister: she engages in courtship as those two engaged in financial speculation.
However, Trollope's native sympathy intruded. A few months later, he wrote: "I have known the woman... all the traits, all the cleverness, all the patience, all the courage, all the self-abnegation,—and all the failure... Will such a one as Arabella Trefoil be damned, and if so why? Think of her virtues; how she works, how true she is to her vocation, how little there is of self indulgence, or of idleness. I think that she will go to a kind of third class heaven in which she will always be getting third class husbands."
Far from an object of contempt, Arabella becomes a tragic figure. Her rank demands that she marry well; her financial situation makes such a marriage virtually impossible. In this position, she cannot afford love or sincerity. Hers is "the tragedy of a young woman who recognises decency, but who feels herself trapped into a life that excludes decent behaviour."
Arabella has been badly schooled by her mother; Mary was more fortunate in having been raised by Lady Ushant of the Morton family, who taught her principles that allowed her to resist her stepmother's mercenary urgings. Yet Lady Augustus is no more pure villain than her daughter. With no mother to take care of her, she found herself married to a man who squandered her dowry. She is working to achieve for her daughter the security of which she was robbed in her own marriage. Her own reward for this long arduous struggle is a scant one: after Arabella's wedding, "[s]he knew she was an old woman, without money, without blood, and without attraction, whom nobody would ever desire to see."
lived the United States, attempting to repair the family's fortunes and observing all aspects of the nation. Upon her return to England, she published Domestic Manners of the Americans
in 1832. Mrs. Trollope strongly criticized the country and its customs: "I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions." The American press responded with strongly negative reviews of Domestic Manners.
Trollope fils visited the United States from September 1861 to March 1862 He published the two-volume North America in May 1862. The book was critical of the country; but unlike Domestic Manners, was written with an evident desire to please, and never patronized. The American reaction was generally positive.
Gotobed, told that it might not have been wise to tell the English nation of its collective faults, replies "You English tell us of ours pretty often." Trollope was evidently referring to his and his mother's criticisms of the United States, as well as those of Charles Dickens
in American Notes
and Martin Chuzzlewit
; and he may have thought it only just to present criticism of English institutions from an American standpoint.
Indeed, there is much of Trollope in Gotobed's questioning, quarrelsome, and often tactless character. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
later became a good friend of the author; but after their first meeting, he recorded in his diary: "...intolerable, no manners, but means well, & would do a good deal to serve you, but says the most offensive things—not a gentleman."
The origins of Arabella Trefoil are more obscure. In early 1877, Trollope wrote: "I have been, and still am very much afraid of Arabella Trefoil. The critics have to come, and they will tell me that she is unwomanly, unnatural, turgid,—the creation of a morbid imagination, striving after effect by laboured abominations. But I swear I have known the woman..." Not a particular woman, he continues; but all of the traits, good and evil.
Although there was no resemblance in character, Arabella Trefoil's houseless wanderings might be based on those of Trollope's beloved niece Beatrice "Bice" Trollope. Lacking a secure home with her father and stepmother, she was forced to resort to a "sterile round of English visits" and endured several "abortive engagements". More fortunate in matrimony than Arabella, Bice Trollope found a wealthy and well-connected husband in Charles Stuart-Wortley, whom she married in 1880 at the age of 27.
Trollope began writing the novel on 4 June 1875, while visiting his son Fred Trollope's sheep station at Mortray in New South Wales
. He completed it on 24 September 1875, while en route from Australia to the United States.
(London) in 1878; this edition was re-issued in 1879 and in 1886. Later editions were published in 1931 (reprinted in 1951 and 1962), in 1940, in 1979, and in 1981.
Trollope received £1800 for the novel. He had received £3000 for The Way We Live Now
in 1875, and £2500 for The Prime Minister in 1876.
suggested that the author was suffering an "attack of misanthropy" and accused him of maintaining a "special inkstand supplied with gall, for use when describing fashionable society, against which his rancour appears to be unbounded." Others were more favorable: a review in The Times
stated that Dillsborough society was rendered in Trollope's "most entertaining manner".
Later critics took a more favorable view of the portrayal of Arabella Trefoil. In 1927, Michael Sadleir
wrote: "The American Senator will be read for the sake of its opening chapters, which set before the reader in a few pages the whole geographical and social pattern of an English county; for the sake of its hunting episodes, which are among the best not only in Trollope, but in the whole of English fiction; and for the sake of Arabella Trefoil, a masterly study of a girl without a heart." More recent critics have found more sympathy for her plight: James Pope-Hennessy
calls her "the finest, most fearless and the most tragic of all [Trollope's] doomed and desperate anti-heroines".
make a brief appearance in the novel.
In chapter 70 of The Duke's Children
, Senator Gotobed is the American minister in London.
There is no indication that Arabella Trefoil is related to the Dean Trefoil of Barchester Towers
.
's Classic Serial program in 2011.
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire...
. Although not one of Trollope's better-known works, it is notable for its depictions of rural English life and for its many detailed fox hunting
Fox hunting
Fox hunting is an activity involving the tracking, chase, and sometimes killing of a fox, traditionally a red fox, by trained foxhounds or other scent hounds, and a group of followers led by a master of foxhounds, who follow the hounds on foot or on horseback.Fox hunting originated in its current...
scenes. In its anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, it presents a scathing but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a woman who has abandoned virtually all scruples in her quest for a husband. Through the eponymous Senator, Trollope offers comments on the irrational aspects of English life.
Plot
The novel is largely set in and near the town of Dillsborough, in the fictional Rufford County. The two principal subplots center on the courtship behavior of two young women.The heroine, Mary Masters, is the daughter of an attorney, and has been raised as a gentlewoman. Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer
Yeoman
Yeoman refers chiefly to a free man owning his own farm, especially from the Elizabethan era to the 17th century. Work requiring a great deal of effort or labor, such as would be done by a yeoman farmer, came to be described as "yeoman's work"...
with aspirations to gentility. While Mary respects Twentyman for his excellent qualities, she feels that she cannot love him as a wife should a husband. She admires Reginald Morton, whose cousin is the squire of Bragton and thus one of the two major landowners of Rufford County. Reginald admires Mary as well; but for most of the novel, each is ignorant of the other's feelings: Mary, as a gentlewoman, cannot take the initiative in such a matter; and Reginald, misinformed that Mary loves another, is unwilling to make an offer and have it rejected.
The anti-heroine of the novel is Arabella Trefoil. Her father is cousin to the Duke of Mayfair; her mother was a banker's daughter. Her parents are unofficially separated, and living in straitened circumstances. Arabella and her mother, Lady Augustus Trefoil, have no fixed abode; they wander from place to place, visiting people who cannot refuse them without creating social awkwardness. At Lady Augustus's direction, Arabella has spent many years struggling to secure a rich husband who will give her and her mother high social standing, an assured income, and a house of their own. She has lately become provisionally engaged to John Morton, the squire of Bragton and a rising figure in the Foreign Office
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, commonly called the Foreign Office or the FCO is a British government department responsible for promoting the interests of the United Kingdom overseas, created in 1968 by merging the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office.The head of the FCO is the...
. He would be an adequate but not outstanding husband by her standards; and when the opportunity presents itself, she attempts to entrap the wealthy and titled young Lord Rufford, concealing these attempts from Morton so that she can accept his proposal should they fail.
John Morton falls ill and dies. Arabella, who is not altogether wicked, visits him at his deathbed despite the fact that this will assist Lord Rufford in escaping her toils. After Morton's death, she accepts an offer of marriage from Mounser Green, a Foreign Office clerk who is taking Morton's place as ambassador-designate to Patagonia. Like Morton, Green is not a brilliant match for her, but an acceptable one. John Morton's death makes Reginald Morton the squire of Bragton; at this point, when Mary Masters fears that he has moved too far above her in status, he confesses his love to her. A proposal ensues and is eagerly accepted.
The American senator of the title is Elias Gotobed, who sits in the U.S. Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
for the fictional state of Mikewa. The guest of John Morton, Senator Gotobed is trying to learn about England and the English. Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled "The Irrationality of Englishmen", he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, the custom of primogeniture
Primogeniture
Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...
, and other aspects of English life.
England, America, and utilitarianism
In Senator Gotobed, Trollope employes a device similar to that used by MontesquieuCharles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu , generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment...
in the Lettres Persanes
Persian Letters
Persian Letters is a literary work by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, recounting the experiences of two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, who are traveling through France.-Plot summary:...
and by Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...
in The Citizen of the World. As an outsider, he comments on the absurd or irrational aspects of English society. Gotobed finds much at fault with his host country: the sale of livings
Benefice
A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...
in the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, the sale of commissions in the British army, the custom of primogeniture
Primogeniture
Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...
, the unelected hereditary House of Lords
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....
and the lack of proportional representation in the House of Commons, and a system that defers to the wealthy and titled at the expense of justice to those of lower social standing.
It is difficult to know the extent to which Gotobed's views reflected Trollope's own. On the one hand, the Senator's denunciations of clerical livings were very similar to criticisms that Trollope had levelled at Bishop Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce was an English bishop in the Church of England, third son of William Wilberforce. Known as "Soapy Sam", Wilberforce was one of the greatest public speakers of his time and place...
. On the other, some of Gotobed's strongest strictures were directed at fox-hunting, to which Trollope was devoted.
Late in 1876, Trollope wrote: "[Gotobed] is a thoroughly honest man wishing to do good, and is not himself half so absurd as the things which he criticises." It should be noted that the novel was written and set during the scandals of Ulysses S. Grant's administration
Ulysses S. Grant presidential administration scandals
An examination of the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant reveals many scandals and fraudulent activities associated with his administration and a cabinet that was in continual transition divided by the forces of political patronage and reform. President Grant, himself, was influenced by both forces...
. The dishonest politician was a stock figure in American novels of the time; and Trollope himself had noted the ubiquity of corruption on his postal mission to Washington in 1868. Yet Gotobed is an honorable man, and Trollope apparently tried to avoid making a caricature of him, notwithstanding a few quaint Americanisms and episodes of tobacco-chewing.
The key is a character's telling the Senator that his views are "utilitarian
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
rather than picturesque" and his lecture's title: "The Irrationality of Englishmen". To Trollope, the English system was strong precisely because it was picturesque rather than logical, and should not be criticized or adjusted according to utilitarian theories. Fox-hunting was one of the strongest illustrations of this. In Ruth apRoberts
Ruth apRoberts
Ruth apRoberts was a Canadian scholar of Victorian and religious literature. Her work focused on 19th-century British literature as it intersected with philosophical issues and spiritual traditions....
' words, "The Senator is too much the rationalist ever to enjoy something he could not think he understood; and Trollope is too much the empiricist to deny the existence of his joy or his sure sense of its beneficence. But he very well knew the absurd aspects of hunting."
English social order
To Trollope, one of the pillars of the English system was a traditional social order in which everyone played his appropriate role. The place of the squire was to occupy his land. Dillsborough is portrayed as slowly declining, a decline that is associated with the long absence of its squire, John Morton. When Reginald Morton, as the new squire, takes up residence at Bragton, the long decline shows signs of coming to an end. The new squire also promises to accept the traditional role and responsibilities: although educated in Germany and given more to study than to the traditional pursuits of a country gentleman, at the novel's end he deprecates the philanthropists who attack fox-hunting, and vows to take up the pursuit himself.Women, courtship, and marriage
Much of The American Senator is taken up with the parallel courtships of Mary Masters and Arabella Trefoil. There is a physical and moral contrast between them: Mary is dark, honest, and sincere; Arabella is blonde, embellished with pearl powder, paint, and false hair, and insincere. Each is urged to give her heart falsely for the sake of a prosperous marriage: Arabella by her mother, Mary by her stepmother. Arabella obeys her mother, in the process coming to despise her; Mary refuses to obey her stepmother, and the two are reconciled at the novel's end.The parallels extend to the mother figures. Both Mrs. Masters and Lady Augustus married men who were above them socially, and both brought money to the marriage. Mrs. Masters was the daughter of an ironmonger who married an attorney; her dowry of £1000 "had been very useful" to her new husband. Lady Augustus was the daughter of a banker who married the impecunious younger son of a duke; to further the parallel, malicious gossip makes her the daughter of an ironmonger as well.
It may have been Trollope's intention to make Mary good and Arabella evil. "I wished to express the depth of my scorn for women who run down [pursue] husbands," he wrote to Mary Holmes. Arabella has been described as a feminine counterpart to Augustus Melmotte of The Way We Live Now
The Way We Live Now
The Way We Live Now is a satirical novel published in London in 1875 by Anthony Trollope, after a popular serialisation. In 1872 Trollope returned to England from abroad and was appalled by the greed which was loose in the land. His scolding rebuke was his longest novel.Containing over a hundred...
or Ferdinand Lopez of The Prime Minister: she engages in courtship as those two engaged in financial speculation.
However, Trollope's native sympathy intruded. A few months later, he wrote: "I have known the woman... all the traits, all the cleverness, all the patience, all the courage, all the self-abnegation,—and all the failure... Will such a one as Arabella Trefoil be damned, and if so why? Think of her virtues; how she works, how true she is to her vocation, how little there is of self indulgence, or of idleness. I think that she will go to a kind of third class heaven in which she will always be getting third class husbands."
Far from an object of contempt, Arabella becomes a tragic figure. Her rank demands that she marry well; her financial situation makes such a marriage virtually impossible. In this position, she cannot afford love or sincerity. Hers is "the tragedy of a young woman who recognises decency, but who feels herself trapped into a life that excludes decent behaviour."
Arabella has been badly schooled by her mother; Mary was more fortunate in having been raised by Lady Ushant of the Morton family, who taught her principles that allowed her to resist her stepmother's mercenary urgings. Yet Lady Augustus is no more pure villain than her daughter. With no mother to take care of her, she found herself married to a man who squandered her dowry. She is working to achieve for her daughter the security of which she was robbed in her own marriage. Her own reward for this long arduous struggle is a scant one: after Arabella's wedding, "[s]he knew she was an old woman, without money, without blood, and without attraction, whom nobody would ever desire to see."
Development history
From 1827–1831, Trollope's mother Frances TrollopeFrances Trollope
Frances Milton Trollope was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope...
lived the United States, attempting to repair the family's fortunes and observing all aspects of the nation. Upon her return to England, she published Domestic Manners of the Americans
Domestic Manners of the Americans
Domestic Manners of the Americans is an 1832 travel book by Frances Trollope, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town...
in 1832. Mrs. Trollope strongly criticized the country and its customs: "I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions." The American press responded with strongly negative reviews of Domestic Manners.
Trollope fils visited the United States from September 1861 to March 1862 He published the two-volume North America in May 1862. The book was critical of the country; but unlike Domestic Manners, was written with an evident desire to please, and never patronized. The American reaction was generally positive.
Gotobed, told that it might not have been wise to tell the English nation of its collective faults, replies "You English tell us of ours pretty often." Trollope was evidently referring to his and his mother's criticisms of the United States, as well as those of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
in American Notes
American Notes
American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June, 1842. While there he acted as a critical observer of these societies almost as if returning a status report on their progress...
and Martin Chuzzlewit
Martin Chuzzlewit
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit is a novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. It was originally serialized between 1843-1844. Dickens himself proclaimed Martin Chuzzlewit to be his best work, but it was one of his least popular novels...
; and he may have thought it only just to present criticism of English institutions from an American standpoint.
Indeed, there is much of Trollope in Gotobed's questioning, quarrelsome, and often tactless character. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of an eminent colonial family who gained renown as the author of the American classic, the memoir Two Years Before the Mast...
later became a good friend of the author; but after their first meeting, he recorded in his diary: "...intolerable, no manners, but means well, & would do a good deal to serve you, but says the most offensive things—not a gentleman."
The origins of Arabella Trefoil are more obscure. In early 1877, Trollope wrote: "I have been, and still am very much afraid of Arabella Trefoil. The critics have to come, and they will tell me that she is unwomanly, unnatural, turgid,—the creation of a morbid imagination, striving after effect by laboured abominations. But I swear I have known the woman..." Not a particular woman, he continues; but all of the traits, good and evil.
Although there was no resemblance in character, Arabella Trefoil's houseless wanderings might be based on those of Trollope's beloved niece Beatrice "Bice" Trollope. Lacking a secure home with her father and stepmother, she was forced to resort to a "sterile round of English visits" and endured several "abortive engagements". More fortunate in matrimony than Arabella, Bice Trollope found a wealthy and well-connected husband in Charles Stuart-Wortley, whom she married in 1880 at the age of 27.
Trollope began writing the novel on 4 June 1875, while visiting his son Fred Trollope's sheep station at Mortray in New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
. He completed it on 24 September 1875, while en route from Australia to the United States.
Publication history
The American Senator was serialized in Temple Bar May 1876-July 1877. A three-volume book version was released by Chapman & Hall (London) in 1877. In that same year, the novel was also published in New York, Detroit, Toronto, Leipzig, and Copenhagen. A one-volume edition was issued by Chatto & WindusChatto and Windus
Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....
(London) in 1878; this edition was re-issued in 1879 and in 1886. Later editions were published in 1931 (reprinted in 1951 and 1962), in 1940, in 1979, and in 1981.
Trollope received £1800 for the novel. He had received £3000 for The Way We Live Now
The Way We Live Now
The Way We Live Now is a satirical novel published in London in 1875 by Anthony Trollope, after a popular serialisation. In 1872 Trollope returned to England from abroad and was appalled by the greed which was loose in the land. His scolding rebuke was his longest novel.Containing over a hundred...
in 1875, and £2500 for The Prime Minister in 1876.
Literary significance and reception
Contemporary reviews of The American Senator were mixed. British reviewers, even those who regarded the book favorably, almost universally felt that Senator Gotobed and his criticisms would have been better left out of the novel. Some reviewers felt that Trollope was growing embittered: a notice in the ExaminerExaminer
The Examiner was a weekly paper founded by Leigh and John Hunt in 1808. For the first fifty years it was a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles, but from 1865 it repeatedly changed hands and political allegiance, resulting in a rapid decline in readership and loss of...
suggested that the author was suffering an "attack of misanthropy" and accused him of maintaining a "special inkstand supplied with gall, for use when describing fashionable society, against which his rancour appears to be unbounded." Others were more favorable: a review in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
stated that Dillsborough society was rendered in Trollope's "most entertaining manner".
Later critics took a more favorable view of the portrayal of Arabella Trefoil. In 1927, Michael Sadleir
Michael Sadleir
Michael Sadleir was a British novelist and book collector.-Biography:He was born Michael Sadler, though upon beginning to publish novels he altered the spelling of his name to differentiate himself from his father, Michael Ernest Sadler, a historian and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds...
wrote: "The American Senator will be read for the sake of its opening chapters, which set before the reader in a few pages the whole geographical and social pattern of an English county; for the sake of its hunting episodes, which are among the best not only in Trollope, but in the whole of English fiction; and for the sake of Arabella Trefoil, a masterly study of a girl without a heart." More recent critics have found more sympathy for her plight: James Pope-Hennessy
James Pope-Hennessy
James Pope Hennessy CVO was a British biographer and travel writer.-Life:Richard James Arthur Pope-Hennessy was born in London on 20 November 1916, the younger son of Ladislaus Herbert Richard Pope-Hennessy, a soldier from County Cork in Ireland, and his wife, Una Constance Pope-Hennessy who was...
calls her "the finest, most fearless and the most tragic of all [Trollope's] doomed and desperate anti-heroines".
Connections to other Trollope works
The Duchess of Omnium and Lady Chiltern of the Palliser novelsPalliser novels
The Palliser novels are six novels by Anthony Trollope.The common thread is the wealthy aristocrat and politician Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Lady Glencora...
make a brief appearance in the novel.
In chapter 70 of The Duke's Children
The Duke's Children
The Duke's Children is a novel by Anthony Trollope, first published in 1879 as a serial in All the Year Round. It is the sixth and final novel of the "Palliser" series.-Synopsis:...
, Senator Gotobed is the American minister in London.
There is no indication that Arabella Trefoil is related to the Dean Trefoil of Barchester Towers
Barchester Towers
Barchester Towers, published in 1857, is the second novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the "Chronicles of Barsetshire". It is possibly Trollope's best known work...
.
Adaptations
A three-part adaptation of The American Senator was broadcast on BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
's Classic Serial program in 2011.
External links
- The American Senator at Google Books
- The American Senator—easy-to-read HTML version at University of Adelaide Library
- Plot and characters of The American Senator at the Trollope Society