Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

• Название: Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
• Автор: Anthony Trollope
• Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

EBook of Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope (www.anthonytrollope.com)

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With all a stupid boy's slowness, I said nothing; and he had not

the courage to carry reparation further. All that was fifty years

ago, and it burns me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered

curs those boys must have been not to have told the truth!--at any

rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well, and

almost wish to write them here.

When I was twelve there came the vacancy at Winchester College which

I was destined to fill. My two elder brothers had gone there, and

the younger had been taken away, being already supposed to have lost

his chance of New College. It had been one of the great ambitions

of my father's life that his three sons, who lived to go to Winchester,

should all become fellows of New College. But that suffering man

was never destined to have an ambition gratified. We all lost the

prize which he struggled with infinite labour to put within our

reach. My eldest brother all but achieved it, and afterwards went

to Oxford, taking three exhibitions from the school, though he

lost the great glory of a Wykamist. He has since made himself well

known to the public as a writer in connection with all Italian

subjects. He is still living as I now write. But my other brother

died early.

While I was at Winchester my father's affairs went from bad to worse.

He gave up his practice at the bar, and, unfortunate that he was,

took another farm. It is odd that a man should conceive,--and in

this case a highly educated and a very clever man,--that farming

should be a business in which he might make money without any

special education or apprenticeship. Perhaps of all trades it is

the one in which an accurate knowledge of what things should be

done, and the best manner of doing them, is most necessary. And it is

one also for success in which a sufficient capital is indispensable.

He had no knowledge, and, when he took this second farm, no capital.

This was the last step preparatory to his final ruin.

Soon after I had been sent to Winchester my mother went to America,

taking with her my brother Henry and my two sisters, who were then

no more than children. This was, I think, in 1827. I have no clear

knowledge of her object, or of my father's; but I believe that

he had an idea that money might be made by sending goods,--little

goods, such as pin-cushions, pepper-boxes, and pocket-knives,--out

to the still unfurnished States; and that she conceived that an

opening might be made for my brother Henry by erecting some bazaar

or extended shop in one of the Western cities. Whence the money

came I do not know, but the pocket-knives and the pepper-boxes were

bought and the bazaar built. I have seen it since in the town of

Cincinnati,--a sorry building! But I have been told that in those

days it was an imposing edifice. My mother went first, with my

sisters and second brother. Then my father followed them, taking my

elder brother before he went to Oxford. But there was an interval

of some year and a half during which he and I were in Winchester

together.

Over a period of forty years, since I began my manhood at a desk

in the Post Office, I and my brother, Thomas Adolphus, have been

fast friends. There have been hot words between us, for perfect

friendship bears and allows hot words. Few brothers have had more

of brotherhood. But in those schooldays he was, of all my foes,

the worst. In accordance with the practice of the college, which

submits, or did then submit, much of the tuition of the younger

boys from the elder, he was my tutor; and in his capacity of teacher

and ruler, he had studied the theories of Draco. I remember well

how he used to exact obedience after the manner of that lawgiver.

Hang a little boy for stealing apples, he used to say, and other

little boys will not steal apples. The doctrine was already exploded

elsewhere, but he stuck to it with conservative energy. The result

was that, as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big

stick. That such thrashings should have been possible at a school

as a continual part of one's daily life, seems to me to argue a

very ill condition of school discipline.

At this period I remember to have passed one set of holidays--the

midsummer holidays--in my father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. There

was often a difficulty about the holidays,--as to what should be

done with me. On this occasion my amusement consisted in wandering

about among those old deserted buildings, and in reading Shakespeare

out of a bi-columned edition, which is still among my books. It

was not that I had chosen Shakespeare, but that there was nothing

else to read.

After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father

to America. Then another and a different horror fell to my fate.

My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who

administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their

credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which,

with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other

scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course

knew that it was so, and I became a Pariah. It is the nature of

boys to be cruel. I have sometimes doubted whether among each other

they do usually suffer much, one from the other's cruelty; but I

suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend

to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and

ugly, and, I have no doubt, sulked about in a most unattractive

manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But ah! how well

I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered

whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way

up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to

everything? And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies

from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money,

which we called battels, and which was advanced to us out of the

pocket of the second master. On one awful day the second master

announced to me that my battels would be stopped. He told me the

reason,--the battels for the last half-year had not been repaid; and

he urged his own unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a

shilling a week would not have been much,--even though pocket-money

from other sources never reached me,--but that the other boys all

knew it! Every now and again, perhaps three or four times in a

half-year, these weekly shillings were given to certain servants

of the college, in payment, it may be presumed, for some extra

services. And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he

received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy, and the cause

of the defalcation was explained to him. I never saw one of those

servants without feeling I had picked his pocket.

When I had been at Winchester something over three years, my father

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